Frozen Orbit

by Patrick Chiles

  “Uncontrolled?” Owen said. “We followed the NPD to the letter. There’s a limit to how sterile we can make a spacecraft or crew.”

  “Correct. We have to limit any damage to the local environment.”

  Owen balked. “What damage? They walked a kilometer in EVA suits to collect a half-dozen ice balls and put them in freezer bags.”

  “We’ve also polluted the planet’s surface with chemical residue from toxic propellants.”

  “Which promptly froze,” Owen reminded her. “And you’re ignoring the fact that the Russians got there first. If there was going to be environmental damage, they’ve already done it.”

  “All the more reason to abort surface ops before we risk further contamination,” she said. “Their presence may be impacting future evolutionary processes.”

  Owen steadied his voice, needing to be firm while hoping to not be as confrontational as he felt. “We hashed these issues out with your office three years ago. What changed?”

  Her eyes narrowed, as if the conclusion was obvious. “Confirmation of biological precursors on the surface for starters.”

  “Which we already structured the mission around. Even though it seemed completely unnecessary, we acceded to PPO’s demands anyway. This doesn’t change anything.”

  “It may, Mr. Harriman. This is uncharted territory and we must consider the impact of our actions. Existing planetary protections may not be enough.”

  And if they had their way we’d never send another human beyond cislunar space again, Owen thought sourly. “We also can’t just hit the ‘blast off’ button and put them into an out-of-phase orbit without a serious emergency to justify it. Magellan still has to be positioned for rendezvous and I’m not going to order the Hoovers to just sit in the cabin until the next launch window. Your concerns are noted, but we are sticking with the plan.”

  By outside appearances, the ascent-stage cabin didn’t look especially roomy. Just shy of five meters’ diameter, the basic capsule was meant for a crew of six. For the Pluto mission, two of those seats had been sacrificed to make room for fold-down bunks and a rather cramped lavatory that was little more than a privacy curtain for a toilet and a small wash basin.

  It was a tight fit, and Roy emerged from behind the lav curtain like a cicada shedding its cocoon. “This is the part of surface ops I hate.” He tossed a slippery ball of wet wipes into the trash and reached for a towel.

  Noelle had already freshened up and was relaxing in a clean pair of coveralls as she fussed over their EVA suits. “You’re too fastidious,” she said. “Look at this.” She pointed at their boots on the deck. “A few sweeps with a brush and they’re almost like new. Remember how filthy we were on the Moon?”

  “Like we’d been crawling around the inside of a coal furnace,” he said with a snort. “The Mars crew really had it bad. That stuff ate away at their seals.” What hadn’t made much news after that expedition’s return was the fact that the crew had nearly met with disaster after two astronauts’ helmet rings began failing in the middle of a surface EVA. “You haven’t found anything like that here, have you?”

  “Nothing so far.” Noelle nodded toward a small workbench behind the flight couches folded up overhead. She’d set up monitors for her rudimentary lab, where a compact gas chromatograph stored in the landing stage was now processing one of those strange ice globes.

  “Is that thing venting?” he asked. An essential step in gas chromatography was the “gas” part: vaporizing the sample into its component elements.

  “Yes, love. Outside,” she said patiently, “and the radiators are removing the waste heat. Nothing to worry about.”

  “Not quite what I meant. I wonder if we could divert some of that waste heat into warming the cabin? Might take some load off of our fuel cells.”

  “That’s a good idea, which we should save for later.” Noelle opened a drawer beneath her lab bench. “There are lots of ways to warm the cabin,” she said, and lifted out a dark shatterproof decanter.

  His eyes widened, immediately recognizing her family farm’s private label. “Wine? How did you—”

  “Champagne, love. Owen allowed me a fair degree of latitude whilst setting up the expedition laboratory. It was easy to slip this in amongst all those bottles of solutions and reagents.”

  “So you’ve been planning this for two years?” Roy examined the bottle with amusement. “Pretty brave to flash this in front of your mission commander, Dr. Hoover. You could get into serious trouble.”

  “I know how to change your mind.” Roy watched the undulating folds of her coverall as it fell in slow motion under Pluto’s weak gravity. He’d been wondering whatever happened to that Christmas present he’d given her.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  “And they’re off,” Traci giggled, watching their crewmates’ heart and respiratory rates spike.

  Jack sighed and reached for the bio-monitor cutoff. “Okay, now it’s gotten weird.”

  “First time they’ve been alone in almost a year. Can you blame them?”

  Before he could answer with some ill-advised snarky retort about Traci’s vicarious love life, an incoming message flashed on the comm panel: Houston, looking for a status report. “What should we tell PAO? They’re always looking for firsts.”

  He was only half joking. “We don’t tell them anything!” Traci said. “We came over three billion miles and they still had to go land on a whole other planet just to have any kind of privacy.”

  “Not really the reason they went, but I’ll go with it.” He checked his watch. “Anyway, flight surgeon’s sure to figure it out in about four hours.”

  “Or he’ll start asking some mighty uncomfortable questions,” she said. The docs sometimes had the worst kinds of tunnel vision when it came to crew health. No doubt some eager young physician would worry they were having cardiac events. At the same time.

  Jack began typing. After entering the requisite information on vehicle condition and EVA reports, he arrived at the last section: surface crew status. With a sly grin, he ended his report with one cryptic sentence:

  IF IT’S ROCKIN’, DON’T COME KNOCKIN’.

  30

  Mission Day 318

  Pluto

  Not content to sleep apart in the “mission-approved configuration,” the Hoovers had laid their cushions and sleeping bags on the floor of their capsule. The only illumination in the darkened cabin came from the faint reflection of starlight from the Plutonian snowfields and the glow of status lights from Noelle’s lab bench.

  Roy rolled over with a drowsy grunt as Noelle disentangled herself from his embrace. She gathered her sleeping bag around her and knelt next to his slumbering form, reaching down to gently stroke his hair. She could have used a couple more hours herself, but once the green strobe had caught her eye it was impossible to ignore: The spectral analysis was finished and its results awaited her inspection.

  They did not disappoint.

  “They’re full of chiral molecules!” The excitement in Noelle’s voice rang through the static like a bell. They could only imagine what she sounded like in person.

  “Not just raw elements?” Jack said. “You’re certain?”

  Her voice crackled over the speakers. “Certain as I can be without a tunneling microscope: adenine, guanine, cytosine, and uracil.”

  “What about the . . . uh . . . snow globes?” He’d almost said “containment vessels,” but wasn’t ready to make that leap just yet.

  “We’ll look for them during today’s transit and we’ll take more here if we don’t find them elsewhere. The surface texture of Sputnik Sea is interesting.”

  “Sputnik Sea?” he asked. “Don’t you mean ‘plain’?”

  “You’d understand if you could see it for yourself.”

  Roy cut in. “We only had a quick look but she’s right, it resembles parts of the Arctic Ocean. Just looking out window one now . . . it’s like a crust covering those ice balls. That’s why it appears pebbly from orbit.”<
br />
  Similar formations had been found in the stormier arctic regions of Earth, there just hadn’t been as much interest in finding improbable biological precursors within them. “You want to take some pics, maybe bag a few more samples?” Jack asked.

  “Affirmative,” Roy said, “if we can keep them in their natural state. Atmosphere and surface composition’s all over the place and I don’t want a ball of frozen whatever it is changing back to gas inside the spacecraft.”

  “That would be fascinating to see on a large scale,” Noelle said as she pulled on her thermal-control coveralls. “If this world had evolved closer to the Sun, it might have become a cauldron of amino acids and nucleotides.”

  Puzzled, Roy scratched at his head. “Just so I don’t misunderstand . . . instead of warming up into the proverbial ‘primordial soup,’ being this far out turned all those gases into a giant freezer that preserves . . . what exactly?”

  “All of the base pairs of chiral molecules you’d need to start weaving RNA strands,” she said. “The precursors form by basic chemistry and combine to make RNA, which catalyzes into a self-copying reaction.” She turned back to the monitor and its stream of data. “They’re all here, perfectly preserved and ready to be thawed out.”

  Half into his EVA suit, Roy sat back on his bunk and struggled to keep up. “Back up a sec, hon. The only organic chemistry class I ever took was the one you taught in Houston.”

  “Homochirality,” she explained. “RNA strands can develop from either left- or right-handed nucleotides. Left-handed gives you amino acids; right-handed gives you sugars. Life has to pick one direction at the beginning.”

  Roy pictured complex organics forming as just so many LEGO sets: Pick a direction to stack your bricks and stick with it. “Makes sense I guess. Life can’t begin from a bunch of confused RNA strands.”

  “If you believe the ‘RNA World’ theory,” Noelle said. “Which I may be warming up to. Since it can self-catalyze, even a small imbalance in either direction would rapidly begin to break symmetry as strands evolved. Even a low excess of one chiral form over another weeds out the surplus nucleotides.”

  “What about reaction energy? It still needs some kind of amplification process, doesn’t it? It doesn’t just happen on its own.”

  “Circular polarized light has been one theory,” Noelle said. “That isn’t difficult to find in star-forming regions.” She gathered herself and settled onto the bench. “This could be tremendous, love. We’d always assumed that homochirality didn’t occur in space. It was a hallmark of life that we were convinced had to originate on Earth.”

  “So those organics the Russians found?”

  “All here,” she said, patting the freezer full of snow globes behind her.

  “And the theory that Earth’s water came from impacts by long-period comets originating out here in the Kuiper Belt? If this stuff came with them . . . ”

  “Then they also seeded Earth like a garden.” Noelle gripped his hands. “This is where we came from.”

  Traci had been following a similar line of thought. “It’s like a do-it-yourself creation starter kit,” she said. “But why would all this stuff be out here in the first place?”

  “Always the ‘why,’” Jack said. “Can’t sometimes things just be the way they are?”

  “You’re too skeptical for your own good. Everything that’s ever existed, invented, what have you—it all came to be because the materials on hand were fashioned into something new. Even if all you believe in is the big bang and random chance.”

  “Conservation of matter and energy,” Jack said. Everything in the universe had once existed within an infinite, single point—a singularity—at the very instant of its coming to be. It might change forms between matter and energy, but everything that existed now had always been thus. “Nothing new under the sun.”

  “King Solomon was even smarter than we thought.” Jack hadn’t even realized where he’d taken his own cliché from.

  “Who?” he asked, then got her reference. “Okay, you got me. But the question now is: What do we do with this? We may have just disturbed something that should’ve been left alone to evolve on its own.”

  “If you think humans just screw up everything we touch. What about our responsibility to ‘be fruitful and multiply’?”

  “Depends on your own moral compass,” he said. “We can’t both be right. Humankind was given an oasis which we then proceeded to royally screw up. Why should we be trusted with spreading life through the universe when we can’t stop fouling our own nest?”

  “Because we weren’t made infallible. If you think we should wait until humanity has perfected itself before we start spreading out, then we’ll never leave. Isn’t that making the perfect the enemy of the good?”

  “Maybe. But this is weighty stuff . . . ” He trailed off, absently twirling a pen in his hand. “Funny. A billion years’ worth of organic compounds falling sunward from out here, bombarding our planet while it’s still forming. We’ve found actual evidence of the panspermia hypothesis. What are we supposed to make of it?”

  “Exactly my point.”

  “It’s like giving a bunch of monkeys a typewriter. Maybe you’ll get Shakespeare in a few million years, but you’re more likely to get a bunch of gibberish.”

  “Maybe,” she said, “if it didn’t all look so idiot-proof. All of this appears to be naturally occurring, out here in creation’s own freezer just waiting for us to find somewhere inviting to thaw them out and mix them up.”

  Jack kneaded at his brow, fighting a looming headache. “So you’re saying it was left here for us to find?”

  “That would look an awful lot like ID theory, wouldn’t it? Assuming that if we made it this far, we’d finally be ready to take it out farther? To go forth and prosper?”

  Jack stared at his bottle of fruit-flavored electrolyte water and longed for a stiff drink. “So now we’re the high-functioning primates drawn out here by some higher intelligence, just like God and Arthur C. Clarke intended.”

  “Well, at least one of them.”

  Jack bit back his words. No sense pitting the will of her deity with that of a notorious dead atheist. He could put aside the whole question of origins: We’re here, we all came from something, and he’d never been inclined to care about why. All that mattered was what we could do in the here and now.

  Life’s essential ingredients were all out here, far from humanity’s clumsy ape hands until their brains had matured enough to be trusted with it. Was that intentional? And if so, by whom? It was no better than the argument that if we couldn’t understand some aspect of nature then it must therefore be evidence of a divine super-being. That was an argument just begging to be refuted, as someone always took up the challenge to figure out the natural mechanism.

  The more our collective knowledge advances the more it approaches some unknowable limit, yet we keep looking anyway.

  It sparked a question which loomed increasingly larger, gnawing at him like a pest trying to claw its way into an attic:

  What if we really are the first?

  Dr. Jacqueline Cheever pulled her chestnut hair into a bun and grudgingly checked her makeup, irritated with the Houston climate that would melt it right off of her the moment she stepped outside. That she was expected to wear any at all was just one more arcane cultural ritual that was best forgotten.

  Jackie Cheever had dedicated her life to the advancement of science, furthering humanity’s understanding of the cosmos and our obligation to leave it unspoiled. As NASA’s newest Planetary Protection Officer, she held it as a sacred duty. Getting the Crewed Spaceflight group to see things that way was perhaps an even more titanic struggle than it was for the populace.

  The average citizen could eventually be brought around, to the extent anyone cared to pay attention. As her political handlers had warned, it was the hotshot astronauts who’d be the hardest to change. Every last one of them was itching to fly off into the solar system for the sake of
adventure. They weren’t stupid, but they did know just enough to be dangerous. Giving them a spacecraft as powerful as Magellan was like giving some teenagers your car keys and a case of beer. Nothing good could come of it.

  In fact, nothing had. So the Russians had made it there four decades ahead of us? Well, good for them, if not entirely unsurprising. When they’d decided something was necessary, they’d gone after it. Maybe they’d dirtied up Pluto, but that was then. We know better now. At least they’d had the good sense to not bring anything back with them.

  Perhaps it was because he’d been center director for so long that Ronnie Bledsoe was able to keep his composure in the face of abject lunacy, a survival instinct he’d developed after years of working around overpowered bureaucrats. Owen, for his part, was having none of it.

  “Pardon me, ma’am, but there is no way we’re going to leave those samples behind. Not after everything it’s taken to get there. Especially not after what we’ve seen from Noelle’s analysis.”

  Cheever’s frown came as much from an instinctive disapproval of his using such a quaint patriarchal address as it did from his argument. “‘Doctor’ is just fine too,” she sniffed. “Putting that aside, it’s especially because of Dr. Hoover’s discovery that we must leave the natural environment unspoiled as much as possible. We’ve already done enough damage by landing humans there.”

  “It’s only one data point,” Owen said. “Since when do we make these kinds of decisions based on that?”

  “Because it’s a very powerful data point,” she said, emphasizing each word. “I can’t see any other way to interpret it, otherwise I wouldn’t be making this demand.”