Titan (71 page)

We don’t deserve this, she thought. Although maybe it looks different if you sit in Beijing. And there are those who say something like this, some terrible conclusion, was inevitable, that the huge technological project we’ve been following was bound to end in grief and destruction.

But I know we don’t deserve to have this done to us. Sure, we got things wrong. And we’re guilty of being the only nation in history to have dropped an atomic weapon on an opponent. But didn’t we beat back the Nazis and the Japs? Wasn’t it a good thing that we won the Cold War, and not the other side? Was it really such a terrible thing, to aspire to walk on the moons of Saturn?…

I will, she thought, never see the sun again.

She felt a wrench, a deep sorrow.

The clouds thickened, and moist air buffeted her face, driven ahead of that horizon-spanning piston of water.

He looked oddly beautiful, she thought with a rogue part of her mind: his face blank and intent, ruined eyes closed, that WASP hair shining in the hab module floods. And he was so strong.

He pulled at the neck of her T-shirt, trying to rip it. The coarse hem burned into her neck. The tough fabric wouldn’t rip, so he pushed his hand up inside her clothing instead. He reached her breast and grabbed it, squeezing hard. Then he shoved his hand downward over her belly, trying to get into her pants.

He pushed his face forward and began to gnaw at her lips once more.

Her left hand was free.

She grabbed the door frame and yanked backwards, as hard as she could.

On Earth, perhaps she couldn’t have budged Angel. But here they were in one-seventh gravity. Locked together, they began to tip over.

Angel released the hand he’d held over his penis, and reached behind to brace his fall. She tried to keep from falling with him; she grabbed at the doorway. But his other hand was stuck inside her clothing; he dragged her down on top of him, helpless.

He landed heavily on his arm, and there was a snap, like the breaking of a thin branch. Angel screamed. He scrabbled against the floor, like a turned-over beetle, his ruined eyes turning back and forth.

She rolled away from him. It was the first moment since he’d burst into her quarters that she hadn’t been in physical contact with him. He was stirring. Clutching his damaged arm against his chest, he was turning over, getting to his knees.

She tried to stand up, but she felt weak and off-balance. She crawled away, towards the galley.

He reached out and grabbed her ankle. The effort cost him the support of his good arm, and she could see him tall flat on his chest. But even so he was able to drag her back towards him.

She was rolled onto her back. For a moment she lay with her feet mere inches from his face. With one slam of her heel in his face, she thought, this could be over. She lifted up her free foot, trying to make herself do it.

Angel flopped towards her, so that his mass trapped her legs, his bad arm pinned between them. He didn’t seem to notice the pain now. With his good hand he reached up and grabbed at the waist of her pants, trying to haul them off her.

Suddenly, Rosenberg stood over them. He held one of their improvised snow shovels, with its sharp blade of Apollo hull section. Holding the handle with two hands, he raised the blade over his head.

His bespectacled face was blank, thoughtful, as if he was considering some abstract problem.

“Rosenberg! Don’t … we have to…”

He brought the blade swinging down through the air, as if he was chopping wood. The blade hit Angel’s neck, with a moist, soft noise, like slicing cabbage.

Blood splashed. Angel stiffened, throwing his head back.

Then he slumped forward against her, his hand still locked in her waist band. The blade seemed to be stuck in his neck.

Rosenberg bent and grabbed Angel’s long hair. He hauled, and just peeled Angel away from her. She saw blood—her blood?—dribbling from Angel’s mouth.

Rosenberg dumped Angel aside. The blade came free of Angel’s neck now, and tumbled to the floor with a clatter.

Benacerraf sat up. The neck of her T-shirt was stretched, but not torn. There was a smear over the front, of blood and saliva and snot. Angel had managed to pull her shorts down as far as her hips, and her bony pelvis was exposed, a dark rim of pubic hair. She tugged at a flap of cloth, covering her crotch.

“He’s dead,” Rosenberg said evenly.

“I think he broke his arm, when I fell on him.”

Rosenberg shrugged. “Brittle bones. He had the skeleton of an old man. To hell with him.”

“Are you all right, Rosenberg?”

He studied her, as if examining a specimen of gumbo. “I don’t know. I’ve come a long way from JPL.”

“Yeah.”

She shuddered, and pulled her arms around her torso.

Hadamard was on his belly, on the ground. Immense chunks of debris, rusted and torn, clattered down around him.

An earthquake, in Florida.

His arms were splayed out, over the ground. His face was pressed into the sweet grass. The grass, he noticed, was a rich green, and still moist from the dew of the morning, and where his cheeks and chin had crushed the blades, there was a warm chlorophyll smell.

There was blood on the grass, though, a deep crimson, and a sharp stab of pain in his mouth. He probed gingerly with his tongue. The front of his mouth was a mess; it felt as if his lower teeth had been smashed, and his lip felt ripped open, as if his teeth had jammed themselves through the flesh.

He had difficulty moving his jaw. Perhaps it was broken.

Now he pulled his hands towards him, and he felt the moist grass rustling beneath his palms. With his hands beneath his shoulders, he pushed, as if attempting a press-up.

He couldn’t lift his chest off the ground. And when he tried, a pain in his legs and knees, extraordinary in its intensity, came flooding over him.

He slumped back to the ground. As he did so, he felt something grind inside his chest, a new source of astounding pain.

Probably he was trapped under debris from the press stand. Maybe his legs were broken too. And it felt as it there was a busted rib or two in there…

His orderly catalogue broke down, as his thinking was overwhelmed by a new wave of agony.

He was thirsty.

He managed to turn his head to look across at the VAB. The big cube of a building had cracked, from the lip of one of the huge Saturn-V-size doorways all the way to the root. Gigantic blocks and sheets of concrete were falling away from the walls of the building, exposing fresh, unweathered material beneath, which gleamed briefly in what was left of the sunlight; for a moment Hadamard had a brief vision of how this magnificent folly must have looked in the 1960s, when it was fresh and new and unweathered, the embodiment of a gigantic technocratic dream.

But then the cracks widened, and the interior of the structure, its skeletal framework within, was exposed.

At the foot of the crumbling building he saw a splash of red metal, splayed out beneath a fifty-foot slab of concrete. It was his car, crushed like a bug.

He twisted his neck and looked across the Banana River.

It looked as if 39-B had gone altogether. 39-A was tilted at a crazy angle. Next to that defiant, rusting skeleton, the Saturn mockup had been snapped in two. The first stage was still standing, like a stump of broken bone, but the upper stages and the fake Apollo spacecraft lay, indistinctly visible, scattered on the ground at the foot of the gantry.

No more Moon flights for a while, he thought.

At least the Moon rocks ought to be safe, those unopened samples in their vaults in JSC. Maybe archaeologists of the future would find that huge, twenty-billion-dollar cache, the unopened cores and sealed boxes, and wonder how so much of this alien rock had found its way to the planet Earth.

The water in the Banana River was draining, as if a plug had been drawn.

The shocks returned.

The overgrown meadow in front of him lifted up. He could actually see the pressure wave traversing the surface of the ground, as if the Earth itself had been shocked into some new fluid form.

There was an immense groan, a rumble deeper than the roar of any rocket engine.

And then the ground lifted up beneath him. He was thrown into the air, his limbs dangling like a doll’s. The pain in his legs was excruciating.

But the experience was oddly exhilarating, as if he were a child, thrown up by his father, with safe, strong arms waiting to catch him.

He caught a last, wheeling glimpse of Florida sunlight.

She showered, scrubbing herself in as much hot water as
Discovery
could feed her. She was bruised, on her breast and her stomach, where Angel had grabbed at her. Her neck was burned from the Beta-cloth. Her lips were a mess, and she knew she would have to ask Rosenberg to treat them.

But not today. She couldn’t stand the thought of being touched again. Not today.

When she was done she dumped her soiled clothes outside her quarters. She got back in and closed the door. She straightened out her sleeping bag, which had been kicked around during the struggle.

She got inside, and wrapped her arms around herself, trying to stop shivering, unable to sleep.

Outside she could hear Rosenberg moving around the hab module, hauling at heavy loads.

When she got too thirsty, she dressed, and pushed her way out of her quarters.

Her little pile of clothes had gone. And so had Angel’s body. The place looked clean, as if nothing had happened.

She went to the galley and dug out the coffee. There were only a few ounces of freeze-dried grains left, and they were hoarding them for rainy days. But, she thought, her days weren’t going to come much rainier than this.

She drank the coffee, thick and black. The hot liquid burned at her broken lips, but the pain was somehow welcome, cleansing. The Titan water in the tanks was as fresh as run-off from a Colorado mountain.

Rosenberg came in from the airlock.

“I saved you some coffee,” she said.

His smile was thin. “Thanks.”

“Where is he?”

“Buried in the gumbo. But he ain’t going to stay there.”

“You’re going to feed him to the water oxidizer.”

“Damn right. Now he’s frozen out there, he will be easier to uh, dismantle. I’m no wet butcher, Paula.”

“My God,” she said. “Sometimes I think you’re as crazy as he is.”

“Was.”

“Won’t it give you any qualms, to feed off life support loops containing the corpse of a human?”

“Why should it? We’ve been eating each other’s waste products for two billion miles anyhow. Look, if it bothers you, I’ll just pass him through the SCWO and vent the products, discard the residue.”

“The main thing is to get him burned, right?”

“Do you object?”

She pictured Bill Angel coming at her, and shuddered. “It was my fault,” she said slowly. “I handled him wrong, from the beginning.”

“What the hell could you have done?”

“He seemed so
competent,”
she said.

“This helps us out with our life support equations. But the logic of our situation hasn’t changed, Paula. In fact—”

“What?”

“We had news from home.” He looked at her, searching her face. “They raised the stakes on us again, Paula. It’s even more important we survive.”

She felt chill. Bill had said something… She’d thought he was raving. “What do you mean?”

He smiled. “I ought to fix up that lip of yours,” he said.

“Later, Rosenberg.”

“Sure… You know, there’s always work to be done in the farm.”

The farm. That was what she was supposed to be doing today.

The thought of entering the tight walls of the old Apollo, with the racks of green, growing things under their sunlight lamps, was suddenly powerfully appealing to her.

“Yes,” she said. “The farm.” She sipped the coffee from Earth, trying to make it last.

Rosenberg went to the comms panel, and tried to find a signal from Houston.

I
n 1990 its controllers
had had
Voyager One
look back and take one last picture sequence before shutting down its camera.

Voyager swiveled its instrument platform and shot a panoramic view of sixty images, encompassing in a single sweep every planet from Neptune, past Jupiter, past Earth, in to the sun. It was already so far from home that it took more than five hours for each pixel, traveling at the speed of light, to reach Earth.

The sun was still striking, a brilliant point object millions of times brighter than the brightest star. But the planets, even the gas giants, were mere points of light.

Even so, had
Voyager
repeated the experiment now, it would have been able to observe the changes that swept over Earth, in the year 2015.

As the clouds rolled across the face of Earth’s oceans, the planet became a brilliant point source of reflected sunlight, its color lightening from blue to white, a twin of scorched Venus.

Patiently, conserving its attitude fuel, the blocky spacecraft sailed further from the sun, pointing its antenna home, obeying its iterated software instructions, calling steadily to Earth.

A
s Titan’s long night
drew to a close, Benacerraf and Rosenberg prepared for their expedition to El Dorado, the crater on Cronos, in search of kerogen.

Working in the scuffed-up gumbo around the orbiter, they prepared to load their sleds. The sleds—six feet long, two wide—were improvised from Command Module hull sections, and had a covering of parachute canvas. Right now the sleds were configured to slide across gumbo; later, on Cronos, Rosenberg expected them to face a surface of raw ice, so they were carrying runners made from steel struts.

The equipment pile was dauntingly high.

Benacerraf bent and started to haul gear up onto her sled, the heaviest stuff at the bottom. The bulky items responded oddly in the low gravity; she had to haul to get them moving, but then inertia took over and she had to guide them, rather than lower them, into the right place on her sled. She checked each item off on the ring-bound checklist she had strapped to her wrist.

The first item was the S-band radio they would use to navigate, triangulating off
Cassini.
Next came a light, high-density power cell, cannibalized from the skimmer, and bottles of oxygen and hydrogen to feed it. Every time they stopped and made camp they would have to recharge the batteries in their EMUs; and the power cells would have to keep them warm during the “nights.” There were spare lith canisters for scrubbing carbon dioxide from their suits’ circulation: precious, irreplaceable. Benacerraf packed a tent, the flimsy hemispherical affair taken from the skimmer.

There were skis, improvised from pieces of
Jitterbug’s
frame. A length of rope. A small bag of tools. Spare parts for the gadgets that would have to keep them alive, Clancy clamps and silver bell wires. Their snow shovels. A medical kit, assembled by Rosenberg: cream for their hands and Benacerraf’s lips, powder and gel and antiseptic cream for skin afflictions and wounds, plasters for blisters, cuts and rubbed raw patches of skin, drugs and painkillers, Lomotil for diarrhea. They had pethidine and morphine—opium derivatives—and various forceps, scalpels, hypodermics and stitching needles.

The rations were based heavily on what was left of the dehydrated stock they’d brought from Earth. Benacerraf hated to exhaust these final supplies, making them almost totally dependent on the CELSS farm thereafter, but Rosenberg insisted. Their diet, he said, was crucial. He had calculated they would each need five thousand calories per day. He showed her how the diet he planned would be high in fats—nearly sixty percent—whereas their normal diet was more than half carbohydrates.

When the load was assembled, Benacerraf had trouble closing her canvas over the top of it. She had to repack a couple of times, trying to balance the mass of the load and to give it all an even shape.

At last she had it tied up with rope. The sled, bound together, was the size and shape of a coffin. Benacerraf hoped that wasn’t an omen. When she was done, she felt exhausted already: she was hot, her breath pumping, her limbs aching from fighting the suit’s stiffness.

Rosenberg estimated that each of their sleds, on Earth, would weigh more than five hundred pounds: the best part of half a ton. Here, gravity reduced that to seventy pounds.

Five stone, to be hauled across a hundred and twenty miles, in full EVA suits.

She pulled her harness around her torso.

The sled harness was improvised from Apollo seat restraints and Shuttle orbiter foot loops. There was a bandolier set of straps she lifted over her shoulders and chest, and a belt around her waist. There was a buckle at the front of her chest, relatively easy for suited fingers to reach and manipulate, and adjustable straps on the shoulders. The most difficult thing about designing the harnesses had been ensuring they would not foul any of her suit’s essential equipment, like the control panel on her chest, and the umbilicals carrying oxygen and water from her PLSS.

She leaned forward, and let the straps take her weight. She adjusted the shoulder straps until they felt comfortable through the layers of her suit.

She thought it was ominous that her sled didn’t move at all in response to her body weight.

Benacerraf looked back, one last time, at Tartarus Base.

Discovery
looked like a DC-10 that had come down in the ice. But her white upper surfaces were uniformly coated with tholin, obscuring what was left of the colorful Stars-and-Stripes and NASA logos. The big windows on the flight deck, streaked by tholin, showed no lights; the interior of the orbiter was black. All the nonessential systems in the orbiter had been shut down, so they could save every last erg from the Topaz reactors while they were away. And that meant almost everything, save the heating and the nutrient, lighting and air supply for the CELSS farm. She played her helmet lamp over the orbiter’s flanks, which glistened with gumbo; it looked as if Titan was drawing
Discovery
gradually into its icy belly.

She stood beside Rosenberg.

“You remember to cancel the newspapers?”

“Yes,” he said gently.

“Let’s get out of here.”

She turned her face resolutely away from the orbiter. Her helmet lamp cast a ghostly ellipse of white light on an anonymous patch of gumbo. The greater darkness beyond, which they must penetrate, was concealed.

She leaned into her traces, with her full body weight. Her snowshoes pawed at the gumbo. The harness rubbed at her shoulders and hips.

The sled, stuck to the gumbo, wouldn’t move.

She straightened up and looked back. There was a hummock in the gumbo, just in front of her sled, to its right. She was catching on that.

She turned again, and leaned into the harness with her left shoulder. She jerked at the harness, throwing her weight into it, trying to keep her footing in the tholin.

She felt something give. She almost stumbled over.

She looked again. The sled had moved forward, a couple of feet.

Rosenberg whooped. “Way to go, Paula.”

“Sure,” she said. She’d covered two feet, out of a hundred miles.

She leaned into the harness again, and jerked. The sled moved forward, coming free of the sticky gumbo with a slurping noise.

She pawed at the slush, trying to keep a steady rhythm. It got easier once she’d started, as long as she maintained the momentum of the sled. Whenever she stopped, she could feel the sled sink back into the welcoming mud. Still, her movement was jerky and uneven, stop-start.

Soon it felt as if the canvas band around her stomach was crushing her insides against her backbone.

It would be a comfort to think the sleds would get lighter as they proceeded, as the two of them ate up the food. But Rosenberg was insisting that they retrieve every piece of waste they produced—every drop of piss, every dump—and haul it back to feed the hungry CELSS farm. It made sense. But the thought of hauling bags of her own shit for a hundred miles across the surface of Titan did not chime with her romantic dreams of what exploring an alien planet should be like.

A wind blew up. It came straight in her face, heavy and dense, and the gumbo rippled sluggishly before her. Her suit temperature dropped as a wind chill set in; she could feel the hot diamonds of her heaters trying to restore the balance.

Rosenberg called, “We have to expect a lot of this. That wind is a katabatic. A gravity-fed wind, blowing downhill, out of the heart of Cronos—”

“Shut up, Rosenberg.”

She bent her head and pushed at the gumbo, the harness digging at her shoulders and hips, Rosenberg’s katabatic wind shoving against her chest, driving onwards.

The light level rose slowly. A burnt orange glow seeped uniformly into the sky.

The gumbo glistened before her, like a plain of dried blood, unmarked and without frontier.

It wasn’t like a dawn on Earth.

As the light came up, there was no sense of opening out, of liberation from the confines of the night. The horizon was so close by, just a couple of miles, and obscured anyhow by the murky mist and haze. And the sky overhead, even on a cloudless day, was a lid, complete and orange and seamless. It was like being in a box: orange haze above, purple-black slush below, bound in by a horizon as close as a fence. And as she walked, bringing nothing but more miles of tholin slush into view—no roads, no trees, no gas stations—she became oppressed, trapped by the lifeless murk.

Benacerraf started to develop sharp twinges in her shoulder muscles, and shooting pains in her shoulder blades. And besides, her right foot was beginning to feel cold and raw. Forward motion was only possible with sharp tugs at her load; she could feel the pressure points in her shoulders, waist, knees and feet.

She stopped, trying to work the stiffness out of her shoulders, but confined in her movements by the heavy suit. The pressure of the harness bands on her chest and gut receded, briefly; she could feel bruises gathering, and burns about her hips where the harness was too tight.

She dropped her head, and ploughed forward again, yanking the sled away from the cloying gumbo.

They spoke rarely.

Mostly, she was alone with the rasp of her breathing, the high-frequency whir of the fans in her backpack and the hiss of oxygen across her face.

She tried to dull out her thoughts, not to think about what lay ahead of her and behind her, how every step was taking her further from
Discovery.
She concentrated, for instance, on the familiar noises of her suit; she tried to imagine she was in space again, in low orbit above the glowing, beautiful Earth, and that the suit was a bubble of warmth and comfort around her.

But the pain broke through that too easily, from her sore foot, her hands, her shoulders.

She tried not to think about the silence on the comms links.

The extinction of mankind.
Rosenberg, figuring from what he knew of the parameters of the rock the Chinese had dropped, said there could be little possibility of human survival. It was the K-T boundary event over again, he said.

What proportion of “mankind” could she have met during her life? A few thousand? And how many did she care about?

Three people, she thought. Just three. And now she couldn’t even find out if they were dead or alive.

Way to go, Paula.

Later, she got angry.

She got mad at her balky sled, every time it stuck in some particularly viscous patch of gumbo and dragged her backwards, yanking at all her sore points. She got mad at the dull Titan weather, at the winds that chilled her but failed to freeze the gumbo to a useful surface.

She got mad at Rosenberg. That wasn’t hard.

She could sink inside herself and pick over some aspect of Rosenberg—the things he said, the body stink when he opened up his suit—and chew on it inside her head—for hours, she found, building up the irritation to a near-hatred. Even those CELSS farm baby carrots, too bitter for her to eat, which he religiously devoured, insisting they were good for oxygen deficiency.

She could plod like this, steadily hating Rosenberg, and then, when she looked at her astronaut’s Rolex, she’d find—if she was lucky—that maybe an hour had passed, bringing her that much closer to the moment she could stop.

After a time, though, even the anger didn’t work. There was too little stimulation for her mind, in the dull landscape of gumbo and haze; she was turned inward, her thoughts stale and repetitive, churning and festering, with no external distraction to relieve her.

Sometimes she wanted to howl, to raise her face to the orange sky and just scream like a frustrated ape. But she knew she couldn’t. If she did, it would let out the beast at last, the Bill Angel craziness she suspected lay deep within her. She would lose her ability to manage this, once and for all.

So she plodded on, muttering.
Stick it. Stick it. Stick it.
Until the urge to howl dissipated, and the blackness receded a little.