“Okay. Take care!” the pilot answered.
As soon as Martin closed the hatch, the acceleration set in. He had to go through take-off in his spacesuit, but at least nothing was keeping them down anymore.
“Using the oxygen tank as a heat source was a good idea!” said Francesca via the helmet radio.
“It was Hayato’s suggestion,” Martin said.
“Did you already test it earlier?”
“Yes, when you were on the way to Huygens. We did it to free the lander for repairs.”
“Ah, then I know who or what examined my sled with the two spare oxygen tanks I had to leave behind in the mountains, halfway to find the probe. I haven’t told you about that, yet. These things must communicate very efficiently.”
Suddenly Martin felt a stabbing pain in his temples, mixed with shock and anger.
“Francesca, did something just happen?”
“Yes, indeed,” the pilot replied. “There has been a small explosion on the surface. It must have been the oxygen tank.”
The anger and the pain in his head quickly faded as the lander ascended. Martin leaned against the wall and closed his eyes.
Shortly before reaching ILSE, Francesca turned off the main engines, and Martin could finally enter the cabin. Five minutes later they docked. Martin had just removed his space suit. He realized he stank, as if he had not showered for weeks, but Jiaying nevertheless greeted him enthusiastically and gave him a long hug. Amy caressed Hayato's back while he held their son. Martin glanced over at Francesca, who leaned against a wall looking thoroughly exhausted.
Part 2: Return
January 2, 2047, Earth
Devendra Singh Arora entered his office with a smile on his lips. He was thinking of the words his daughter had spoken as he had left his home, “Wuv you sooo much. Two gummy bears? Pwease?”
“Happy New Year! You look like you had a great start,” said his colleague, Ellen, with whom he shared an office. Everyone called her Dipsy because she supervised the DPS, or Data Processing System, for the spaceship ILSE.
“The same to you. Yes, we shared a toast with the twins at midnight.” Devendra looked down at his clothing. He noticed a spot on the sleeve of his gray shirt. It must have happened when he had eaten breakfast together with his family.
“Imagine, they are already over a year old,” Ellen said. “You should bring them by again—I haven’t seen them since they were babies.”
“You’re right, and anyway, they always want to know where I am going,” Devendra said with a smile. His son and his daughter were such darlings. In retrospect he was glad his astronaut career had come to nothing. Shortly after recovering from his training injury he had met his current wife.
He settled into his desk chair. “Is there any news from Saturn?”
“You really were on vacation, weren’t you?” replied Ellen with a grin. “I don’t even know where to start.”
“You know I do not take any work home with me, on principle.” When he was transferred from astronaut training to the Johnson Space Center (JSC), as a kind of compensation for not being able to go on the trip to Saturn, it had taken a while for his new colleagues to get used to his principles. Very few people at the agency did not want to ever be disturbed at home, but for him this was important. Everyone here did unpaid overtime work, but when he had time off, he needed it for his family and for himself.
“The message you received from this guy, Robert Millikan... the ILSE crew actually found activity on Titan.” Ellen then started to tell him everything that had happened during the last two days.
Devendra leaned forward and listened. It took Ellen fifteen minutes to finish her report. In between, he repeatedly wiped sweat from his forehead. One time he even got up to check the air conditioning, but it was running at almost full power. He turned the knob to its highest setting.
“Forty-eight hours! I was gone 48 hours, and all of this happened?” Devendra leaned back in his chair. “This is insane. I am going to need a cup of coffee first. You want one?”
Ellen nodded. “Let’s go to the cafeteria.”
Devendra turned toward his computer. “Just a moment, I am going to start this booting up, since it always takes so long.” He’d had the same computer since he had started working here, mostly due to NASA currently lacking sufficient funds for new purchases. Ellen was already waiting by the door.
The cafeteria was surprisingly crowded. It appeared many of his colleagues had taken time off and wanted to chat with one another after the holidays. The vending machine spit out a Styrofoam cup and filled it with hot coffee. Devendra immediately sipped it, and as usual he burned his tongue with his first mouthful. He just laughed because he did not want to let it spoil his mood. Many colleagues greeted him. The faces he knew, but he could not associate most of them with their names. He was almost a celebrity here, since he had not reached his position as CapCom in the usual way. In addition, his turban and beard made him stand out from the crowd, even though he was no longer the only Sikh at the JSC.
“Hey Dipsy,” one of the others asked his colleague. “Have you heard about this?”
Devendra left the two of them and walked up to the long row of windows. There he pulled a chair toward himself, sat down, and looked out on the lawn. Gradually, the din behind him faded away. His coffee was half empty by the time Ellen came up to him.
“Sorry,” she said, “I had to talk to Sinclair, who will be responsible for guidance systems on the next Mars mission.”
Devendra looked up at her and asked, “The one that keeps getting postponed year after year?”
Ellen shrugged and pulled a chair up next to him. “Next year it’s really going to happen, he says.”
“Poor Sinclair.”
NASA had also asked the Sikh whether he would be available as an astronaut, but he could not imagine this being a serious offer. Maybe they just wanted to give him the impression they had not forgotten about him. Devendra had informed the space agency he was regrettably unable to accept it. He really liked the role he was playing right now. While he basically was an observer, he could contribute to getting ILSE back home safely someday.
This was why the loss of Marchenko had hurt him so much. At first, Devendra instinctively tried to blame himself for aspects of the loss. Yet during the past two days he had managed to see this as nonsense. His wife had helped him a lot in coming to this conclusion.
“How crazy, it’s been only a few days.”
Ellen gave Devendra a puzzled look. Of course, she was not able to follow his silent thoughts.
“It does not matter,” he said. “I was just thinking.”
His colleague nodded, since she knew him well by now, and had become a friend in the meantime.
Ellen asked, “And how are you doing?”
“I do not know,” he replied. “I have been working and have had little time to think about it.” As if on cue, both of them got up. Devendra offered his arm and Ellen took it. Like an old couple, they walked through the long, neon-lit corridors until they reached their office.
Devendra hit the space bar on the keyboard of his PC to wake up the monitor. Only 137 emails, he silently marveled. There were times when he would spend half of Monday just working through his emails. He glanced through the messages. Most of them were from the team watching ILSE and he was only CC:ed on them—status reports, summaries, sometimes a request for certain data. Most of it did not directly apply to him, since the CapCom only served as the connection to the astronauts. He was allowed to talk to them, but he really did not have much say-so—with the exception of the means of communication, how he conveyed a piece of unpleasant news to the crew was his own decision.
Amidst all the emails with sender labels of nasa.gov, Devendra noticed one that seemed to be from a private account. It had been sent from Robert Millikan, the guy from the former Green Bank Observatory who had informed him about the signal sent by the Huygens probe. He probably only wanted to know what they had concluded about it. Devendra
shook his head. The events of the last few days were not ready for public consumption yet. A presumed new life form, the second within a few days—he was sure NASA wanted to keep this fact under wraps until things were clarified. He would just send Millikan a few evasive and encouraging words.
Or should he first deal with the agenda for the day? The team meeting was about to start in half an hour. He had better be prepared, as there probably would be a lot to discuss today. No. He braced himself. The old man, Millikan, whom he imagined to be a white-haired, grandfatherly type, deserved to receive an answer. After all, it was his message that had created the stir at NASA, so Devendra opened the email. He had already mentally formulated his answer, so he was even more shocked by what he read now. Millikan supposedly had received a short radio signal—from the surface of Enceladus!
“Ellen,” he said, unable to keep this to himself, “imagine; someone just wrote me that he received a signal from Enceladus.”
His colleague got up, came toward him, and looked over his shoulder.
“Millikan? Isn’t he the radio astronomer?” she asked.
“Yes, and he was right once before. Do you know what this means?”
“You really think Marchenko...?”
Devendra nodded several times. “Perhaps—or at least it’s Valkyrie. Of course we will have to verify this. Maybe it is only a reflection of a signal sent by ILSE. The radio antenna only recorded the time-integrated signal, and unfortunately Millikan could not decode it.”
“Why did we receive this transmission, but ILSE didn’t? The spaceship is much closer to it.”
“I do not know. Perhaps it was in the radio shadow of Saturn at the very moment.”
“And when did all of this happen?”
Devendra scooted closer to the monitor.
“Fuck,” he cursed, which was not typical for him. “It occurred the day before yesterday, in the evening.” For the very first time he felt bad about having kept his New Year’s Day free from any connection with work. If only he had checked his emails on his tablet.
He looked at his watch. Twenty more minutes before the team meeting. For once he was glad to be participating in a meeting soon. The others surely would have some ideas on how to proceed.
They met in FCR White, on the fourth floor of Building 30. Twenty years ago, the offices had been moved due to a shortage of space, yet the FCR, or Flight Control Room, was still in the same windowless building that had been constructed for the Apollo program back in the 1960s. Everything here smelled of history. Devendra let Ellen enter the room first, and they saw some of their colleagues were already there. FIDO, the Flight Dynamics Officer, sat in the first row and yawned as his greeting to them. Since the trajectory of ILSE needed to be checked around the clock, he was one of the people working in shifts.
Even after three years, Devendra was still glad all desks had little signs describing the person’s function in NASA acronyms. The room had space for five rows of desks and about twenty specialists, who changed regularly and sometimes came from outside contractors. He therefore could not possibly remember all of their names and faces.
The current status data for ILSE was being projected on the large wall in front. Devendra could not make much sense of all these numbers. This was not his job, but the task of GNC, EGIL, FAO, EECOM, and so on. And of course, there was the DPS or Dipsy, his officemate Ellen. She had patiently explained all of these acronyms to him at meetings when he had first arrived, but a few days later he would have forgotten them again.
Behind them, Jennifer Seidel entered the room. She was the FD, or Flight Director. The boss, who was responsible for things running smoothly. ILSE was her expedition. She had tried to resign right after Marchenko’s death, but the Chief Administrator of NASA had personally asked her to stay and not leave the crew in the lurch. Jennifer had changed, though. In the few days since then, Devendra had not once heard her laugh. The rings below her eyes revealed her lack of sleep, and she more than likely had spent yesterday’s holiday in the Mission Control Center.
“A Happy New Year to all of you,” the FD said as she started the meeting. “Most of all, let’s hope for a quiet year, ending with a successful homecoming.”
The staff applauded, and Devendra joined them in doing so.
“I assume you are all up to date,” Jennifer said. “After all this excitement, things seem to be coming to a happy end after all, so to speak. I wanted to talk with you about how each of your areas of expertise could improve things to ensure a smooth return trip for ILSE. That is, if there is such a thing in space.”
EGIL spoke up. “Electrical, General Instrumentation, and Lighting,” the specialist said. “I am not sure about how we are to represent things to the public. What should I say if someone asks questions?”
“Could PAO please answer that?” Jennifer Seidel looked to the right, at the representative of the Public Affairs Office. Devendra could not remember the woman's name.
“We are currently evaluating options,” the young woman said. “It is not very easy. We would like to avoid undue excitement in the media. Therefore I would ask you to remain silent and have some patience. I should definitely know more by tomorrow.”
“Thank you, PAO, we are looking forward to hearing from you.” Even the Flight Director’s hands were tied as far as dealing with the public was concerned.
Devendra raised his hand, and Jennifer nodded to let him have the floor. He cleared his throat.
“There is one issue we have to resolve before talking about the return trip. Robert Millikan; you surely will remember his name; has received a radio signal from the surface of Enceladus.”
A young, long-haired man stood up, and seemed exceptionally excited. The sign on his desk displayed the acronym INCO—the Instrumentation and Communication Officer responsible for radio traffic with ILSE.
“When did this happen? We have not received anything here.” The INCO nervously rubbed the side seam of his pants. He probably was afraid of having made a major mistake.
“The signal was received in the evening of the day before yesterday, at the Green Bank Radio Telescope,” Devendra explained. “It was much too faint for you to receive it. Unfortunately, I just found out about it this morning.”
Jennifer wrinkled her nose at him.
Devendra noticed her dissatisfaction with his news. “Yes, FD, this is bad. I am sorry, but I cannot change it.”
“No problem,” she said, “but before we get everyone excited, we should check to see if it could somehow be something else.”
Devendra explained what Millikan had written about it, that the signal definitely contained a message. Therefore it could not be the result of a random electrical discharge that just happened to be received in the correct wavelength.
“We cannot completely rule out a reflection, can we?” she asked the CapCom.
“That is correct, Jennifer. A signal coming from somewhere else could have bounced off Enceladus. In this case we would have to ask why anyone would send transmissions in the direction of that moon. Everything we have out there concerning probes and ships, of which there are very few, uses directional antennas. They certainly would not aim at Enceladus if they were trying to reach us.”
“We should still check in case it is actually a reflection.”
Devendra nodded in agreement. The FD had summarized everything perfectly.
“Does anyone else have a possible explanation? Or maybe another reason why we should not inform ILSE about it?”
Devendra was quite sure why the FD had been offered the job. The 50-year-old woman was an expert in psychology and politics. Once the crew of ILSE learned of this signal, fresh wounds that were just beginning to heal would be torn open again. Even if they phrased it very carefully, it would inevitably raise new hopes where none might be appropriate. One fact remained, however. Since then, the signal appeared not to have been repeated. Otherwise, Millikan would certainly have mentioned it to him.
He remembered the Valkyr
ie drill vehicle was still stuck up there, somewhere in the ice. Perhaps the AI on board had sent a message before finally turning itself off. Devendra made a note to check later with the manufacturer of Valkyrie whether such a behavior was preprogrammed.
EECOM spoke up, “Electrical, Environmental, Consumables, and Mechanical.” The stocky older man was responsible for the life support system on ILSE, among other things. Devendra liked to talk with him about astrophysics, a field in which EECOM also held a Ph.D., but he had forgotten the man's name. “There is nothing natural up there that could cause such a discharge. I ran the calculations. If we assume Valkyrie is the source, the message would have cost it at least half of its battery charge. There is nothing else left there to send us such messages.”
“Fine,” Jennifer said. “Then we’ll just have to postpone the planning of the return trip for later. CapCom, you will need to think about how you can tell it to the crew without creating unnecessary hopes. Perhaps we should come up with some excuse, I don’t know.”
“Should I...”
“No, Devendra, when you are ready, we are going to formulate the message. I trust you completely to deliver it, since you know them better than I do. I myself will stay in the background.”
Was this a punishment, to teach him not to ignore messages on his computer for too long? He would not put it past the FD, and if it were so, he certainly deserved it.
“Could you come to my office as soon as you can?” she asked him.
Devendra nodded.
“I will see the rest of you, by tomorrow at the latest. Have a nice day everyone.”
Jennifer Seidel got up and left the room with long strides.
The rough draft did not even take him ten minutes. Devendra then took his handwritten notes to the FD’s office. He preferred to ad-lib, and only took the notes to make sure he did not forget anything. He knocked, opening the door when his boss said, “Come in.” The office was smaller than his own, but Jennifer Seidel did not have to share it with anyone. So far, he had only ever met her here in her office, or in the FCR. Does she actually have a private life? he wondered. Jennifer must have been at NASA for a long time, since she knew absolutely everyone and everybody knew her. Her face appeared a slight gray, as if she had aged in her little sunless office. Her desk did not display any family photos or any of the other little personal items one might expect.
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