Titan (72 page)

After five hours, they had completed six miles. Benacerraf was exhausted, the little water spigots in her helmet running dry, the air circulating in her suit stale.

Rosenberg pulled alongside her. He ran a gloved finger over her bandolier. “Look at this,” he said, and he lifted up a harness joint with a fingertip. The stitching was torn, and Benacerraf’s harness was twisted. “This joint is double-stitched, but these couch harnesses were never designed for the kind of stresses we’re subjecting them to now. I guess you didn’t notice. You’ve been dragging the sled with the harness out of alignment. Your torso must have been twisted. No wonder your shoulders hurt.”

“Rosenberg, I’m done. Let’s get the tent up.”

“We haven’t completed the schedule, Paula. Another three or four miles and—”

“I know about the schedule. I don’t care about the damn schedule, Rosenberg. I’m telling you I need a break.”

“It’s just that right now we’re in as good a position as we’re going to be. We’re still full of food, and our core body temperatures are high, and we’ve had plenty of reasonably natural sleep back in the hab module. Later, it’s going to be harder to—”

“Help me raise the fucking tent, Rosenberg, or you’re going to get a sled runner up your ass.” She pulled the parachute fabric off her sled.

Still complaining, he helped her haul out the tent.

The skimmer tent was a ball eight feet across. The airtight skin was reinforced with parachute canvas, to give it additional strength. Rosenberg roughly inflated it with a feed from oxygen and nitrogen tanks. They anchored it to the gumbo with ropes and wide, flat, anchorlike spikes, driven deep into the slush. The tent sat on the slushy surface of Titan like a sad beachball, its muddy yellow surface drab and uninspiring, fat air and power lines snaking into it from the tanks in Rosenberg’s sled.

Now the two of them worked with the snow shovels to cover the tent over with a thick layer of slush. This ought to retain some of their heat. It was slow work; the slush at first just slithered off the canvas, and it took long, hard minutes of labor before the tent was covered over.

Rosenberg led the way into the tent, crawling through the crude airlock. Benacerraf followed. In her bulky suit, she kept colliding with Rosenberg’s limbs and helmet; she felt like some bug crawling around inside a cocoon.

Rosenberg hooked up a low-watt light and an electric heater. “Wait a few minutes until we warm up.”

The elements of the heater started to glow crimson red, a sharp color very unlike Titan’s dull orange. She sat close to the heater, watching the elements grow brighter, seeing their multiple reflections from the layered visors of her helmet. It was, she thought, heat brought to this ice moon from the remote center of the Solar System.

Rosenberg spent the time fiddling with the spare PLSS. This backpack—intended for Nicola Mott—had been rigged with a powerful vacuum pump and blower. They would use it to keep the tent air circulating through its lith hydroxide carbon dioxide scrubbers. If either of their packs failed during the march, this spare would serve as a backup.

At last, Rosenberg said the air and temperatures were okay.

Benacerraf cracked the seal of her helmet.

Chill air gushed into her helmet, at her neck and over her face. Her breath immediately misted before her face, and gathered as frost on the glass of her faceplate. She coughed, and took a deep breath. The air was so cold she could feel it burning at her lungs, and digging into the flesh of her face. The warmth of her suit seemed to gush out at her neck, and the cold seeped deeper into her.

“My God, Rosenberg.”

“Can you breathe? What can you smell?”

She sniffed, but her nose seemed blocked. “It’s so damn cold.”

“I know. I’m sorry. It isn’t going to get a lot better.”

She tried again, dragging the air through her nostrils. The cold of it seemed to scour at her nasal passages, the back of her throat.

The air stank.

“Bad eggs,” she said. “Farts.”

Rosenberg cracked his own helmet now; she could see steam billow out around his face, as it his suit was a mobile sauna. He grimaced. “Methane,” he said. “Other shit, too. Welcome to Titan, Paula.”

“Let’s get this over with.”

Benacerraf took off her boots and gloves; her fingers immediately felt numb and the tips turned pasty-white, but despite the cold, it was a relief to get the boots off her sore feet.

She began digging around inside her suit, opening zips, trying to get at her urine bag. When she had it, she tipped it up into a larger plastic storage bag. She tried to keep the whole operation sealed up, but her cold hands were clumsy, and a few drops of the thick piss escaped and splashed on the gumbo-streaked fabric of her sleeves. She sealed up the bag and passed it to Rosenberg; he pushed it into a corner of the tent, far from the heater, where it would freeze quickly.

Mercifully, neither of them had taken a dump into their suit collectors during the walk. That was something to face another day.

She plugged her PLSS into the power feed, to charge up its batteries. She checked the status of her lith canisters and other consumables.

Rosenberg had brought a couple of bags of Mount Othrys water into the tent. These had refrozen, of course, during the haul; now he held them close to the heater and mashed them up with his boot.

There was enough water for seven or eight days, enough to be able to make it back to
Discovery
from the edge of the ice sheet without resupply. After that, they would be on the ice of Cronos, and ought to be able to collect local water.

When the ice was melted, they used the water to drink, and to resupply the spigots in their helmets, and to rehydrate a couple of packets of food.

Washing, they had decided, was a luxury for this trip.

The menu was soup, rice, biscuits and chocolate, with a handful of baby carrots. Benacerraf gulped down her food as rapidly as she could. The soup made a tiny warm place at the center of her body. The carrots still tasted bitter, but Rosenberg devoured his, and she passed him her portion.

Rosenberg measured the amount she drank. They had to watch out for dehydration. Cold air couldn’t hold much moisture, and with every breath she took, her nose and mouth were trying to humidify the air. She could lose a gallon of water a day that way, through her nose and breathing passages. It was a vicious circle; the more she dried out the less thirsty she would feel.

She gulped down the last of her ration. “I’m done,” she said, shivering. “I think I’ll seal up again.”

He checked the Rolex strapped to his wrist. “Not yet, Paula. Remember what we said. We have to leave the suits open a full hour before sealing up; we have to get the moisture out.”

Benacerraf thought of arguing against that, but he’d already relented on the schedule today.

Anyhow he was right. If the dampness from her body seeped into the suit’s layers, it would shortout their insulating effect. She could even freeze in there.

“Let me look at your foot,” Rosenberg said now.

“It’s just a friction injury.”

“Then let’s stop it getting any worse,” Rosenberg said mildly. “Come on, Paula. Doctor’s orders.”

With great reluctance, Benacerraf removed the sock she was wearing on her right foot.

The side of her foot was rubbed raw, all the way back to the heel. Rosenberg rubbed cream into it, and stuck a plaster over the worst of her blisters. “If this keeps up we’ll have to think about cutting a chunk out of that boot. I guess it wasn’t designed for hiking.”

“No. Thanks, Rosenberg.”

When Benacerraf had sealed up her suit again, she lay down on her side, facing the soft plastic wall, away from Rosenberg. When she reached out to the wall and touched it with her gloved hand, she could feel how stiff it was, and a rime of frost gathered from their breath and the moisture emitted by the hot Earth-born bodies inside their suits scraped off on her fingertip.

She would be waking up to darkness again, she realized, to another day of tough hauling across the bleak, featureless gumbo.

It was impossible to settle her head inside her helmet. The damn thing wasn’t designed to be a pillow, after all. Tomorrow night, she’d put some kind of cushion inside here, something from the sled. Anything soft, even a scrap of parachute canvas.

She closed her eyes and tried to ignore the stiffness of her shoulders, the way her hip dug into the ground, the soreness of her feet, the sucking cold of the icy slush below her.

The suit heater labored to warm her; gradually the cold of the tent was dispelled, and the fresh oxygen-nitrogen blowing across her face dispelled the stink of methane.

The news from home,
they’d taken to calling it.

It was impossible to grasp the scale of it, and so she didn’t even try. Maybe their isolation and abandonment had, in an offbeat way actually helped. After so many years away from Earth she found it hard to remember that there were members of the human race beyond the handful who had left Earth orbit with her, in 2008. After so long in confinement, the hab modules and landing craft and pressure suits making up a series of high-tech prisons, stretching back years, it was difficult to imagine walking, unimpeded, in the open air. Even if by some miracle she could be transported home now, she suspected she would be some kind of agoraphobic, a recluse, shunning company and light.

Even her family, Jackie and the boys, seemed to be receding from her. After all, the boys had lived half their brief lives without Benacerraf. If she had been taken home, she wouldn’t have recognized them, nor they her.

They’d been cut off up here, on this ice ball in the sky. They couldn’t have gotten home anyhow. The fact that home may not even exist any more really didn’t seem to make much difference. She still faced the same grinding numbness, the same lengthy list of chores to stay alive, every time she woke up, whether humanity lived or not.

It made no difference.

They didn’t talk about it, much. Rosenberg never referred to people he had lost, places he would never see again.

But that was Rosenberg. He was probably happier up here on Titan anyhow; human society had never done many favors for smart, goofy kids like Rosenberg, no matter how much it needed their inventions.

As for herself, maybe she was working through some kind of post-shock syndrome. Christ knows, she thought, I’m entitled to. Here she was stranded with an unfit wacko on a moon of Saturn, and it looked as if the world had come to an end, and she appeared to be developing crotch rot. How was she supposed to react?
Now here’s my plan…

On the whole, she concluded, however, she was handling this pretty well. In a way, even the walking helped. Even the pain. Something to do, to occupy her mind during the long, slow-time Titan days.

Sleep times, however, were harder to handle.

On the fifth day, they reached the lip of the ice plateau Cronos.

Benacerraf stopped, and leaned against her harness.

The break in the landscape was surprisingly sharp. Maybe a half-mile ahead of her, the gumbo visibly thinned. Then a ridge of eroded gray-white water ice pushed its way up out of the tholin, like a beach rising from some sludgy polluted ocean. The slope was shallow at first, but Benacerraf could see how it continued on upwards, until it was lost in the thick band of horizon haze. The ice was worn with gullies and grooves, like old sandstone, and Benacerraf could make out stripes and stains of tholin down the gray buttresses.

As far as she could see the ridge continued, a band of dull gray like a wall across the world, merging at last with the horizon.

Rosenberg came up to her, breathing hard, leaning against his traces. “Magnificent, isn’t it?” Rosenberg’s voice was odd: light, fragile. And his stance seemed awkward; he seemed to be leaning too far into the traces. She tried to look into Rosenberg’s helmet. But his visor was obscured by an orange reflection from the hazy sky, frost, a smear of tholin. Rosenberg was the doctor; Benacerraf had been focusing on her own minor ailments, and trusting Rosenberg to look after himself.

Maybe he wasn’t.

She looked up dubiously at the slope they would have to climb. “Magnificent. Absolutely. Let’s go on.”

She led the way once more.

It got easier, despite the slope. It was like climbing Othrys. The gumbo got gradually thinner and less clinging though less supportive of the sled until at last her snowshoes were clattering on bone-hard ice, and the sled’s base was scraping with an ominous grind across the slope.

She stopped again, and waited for Rosenberg to catch up. Even in such a short distance he seemed to have fallen a long way behind, and it took him some minutes to make up the ground.

“Time for the great changeover, Rosenberg,” she said.

His breath was a noisy rasp, and he didn’t attempt to speak; he just let himself out of his harness and began to unpick the knots on his sled cover.

They had to fix their aluminum runners to the bases of the sleds. Benacerraf found it difficult to handle the big wing nuts with her gloved hands. The first time she twisted too hard, and the thread of the bolt sheared right off, coming away in a spiral twist.

Rosenberg dug out a spare for her. “Take it easy,” he said. “Steel is brittle at these temperatures, remember.”

Next she fitted her skis to her feet. These were just slats of hull metal, with opened-out overshoes fixed to them for boots.

After stowing the snowshoes and lashing up the sleds, they resumed again.

It took her a few hundred yards to get used to the skis, and the half-sliding action they required. There was a lot of work for her knees and ankles, against the stiffness of her suit. Soon her joints were aching, and muscles on the back of her calves were announcing their existence with pulses of stiffness and pain.

But when she settled into a new rhythm, she seemed to make faster and easier progress than before. To haul the sled she was able to lean steadily into her traces, rather than having to yank at the sled as she’d had to over the gumbo, and that smoothed out the pains in the pressure points on her shoulders, hips and waist.