Titan n-2

by Stephen Baxter

Benacerraf was orbiting in a plane a few feet above the orbiter’s payload bay, with its shining insulation blankets, its complex shadows, the empty blackness of space beyond.

  As the centrifuge picked up speed, the Universe started to wheel around her, so she closed up the windows, pulling down compact little aluminum blinds. Enclosed, she could feel her feet pressing more firmly against the floor. There were hand-rails here, painted green, and she hung onto them now.

  Experimentally, she moved her head, this way and that. Immediately, waves of nausea and giddiness swept over her.

  The trouble was, this wasn’t true gravity, but centripetal acceleration induced by the spin. There was also Coriolis force, the sideways push that produced weather patterns on the rotating Earth. It was fine as long as she didn’t move. But if she moved her head in the direction of the spin, Coriolis pushed back with a force of a fifth of a G. And if she moved it in the opposite direction, her head felt lighter by the same amount. If she were to try to climb up, the Coriolis would push her sideways. And so on.

  There were other problems, too. There was a variation, like a tide, of the size of the force along the length of her body; her head was a good deal closer to the axis of spin than her feet. The centrifuge’s arm couldn’t have been much shorter than it was, or that difference would rise above a few percent, and cause damaging hydrostatic pressure differences in her tissues.

  There were two fold-up exercise devices in here, a cycle ergometer and a treadmill, both folded away against the wall. Moving carefully, she reached down now and pulled out the bike.

  The fake gravity was still so low that she had some trouble starting; her pedal motions tended to lift her off her seat. She had brought a pillow which she braced now against the ceiling of the cabin, and wedged herself in place with her head. She held tightly to the handlebars. Her feet were in pedal straps, so she could pull down with one pedal while pushing with the other, and that helped keep her in place.

  Nobody had run a mission in microgravity much beyond a few hundred days. Nobody knew for sure what the impact of very long term exposure to microgravity would be, or if any of the countermeasures they were taking would work. And nobody had tried to live for years under one-seventh G, as they would have to on Titan. The surgeons didn’t know if that was even survivable. For sure, the crew had to expect a long-term loss of bone mass of maybe a quarter, even after they had reached Titan.

  Exercise, which would help combat the other damaging micro-gravity deconditioning processes — muscle atrophy, bone marrow loss, reduction in T-lymphocytes — was no use with the real show-stopper, the cumulative loss of bone calcium. And although the crew would be treated with osteogenic drugs — and there was hopeful talk, which had so far come to nothing, of finding ways to stimulate bone growth with electromagnetic fields — the surgeons on the ground had agreed that the only practical solution was to remove the cause: to restore the crew, periodically, to gravity.

  So this centrifuge had been improvised. Every crew member was supposed to work out in here, in conditions of nearly a G, for several hours a day.

  She didn’t really object to the exercising, uncomfortable as it was. Unlike some of the others. It got a lot of the stiffness out of her underused muscles, especially her legs. It was as if her body had an agenda of its own, every now and again demanding that she give it some work to do. And she enjoyed the glow of rude health she experienced after a tough work-out.

  It made her look better, too — more like herself — because the extra flow of blood to her legs reduced the puffiness around her eyes.

  Anyhow, she thought, it was better than rickets.

  And she enjoyed the privacy of this snug, enclosed little bay, the isolation from the others.

  As she worked, she thought about her crew.

  Rosenberg seemed relatively content with his restricted life: pursuing his own research, bitching at the others when some disturbance wrecked one of his careful experiments. But he was drawing inwards, she thought.

  So, too, was Nicola Mott, Mott seemed moody, perhaps depressive, ground down already — despite her experience on Station — by the dullness of the interplanetary trajectory, without even the glowing skin of Earth sliding past the windows as a distraction.

  But Siobhan Libet, who of all of them was closest to Mott, seemed to be hanging on to her cheerfulness — her sense of wonder — longer than the rest, and she seemed to be doing a good job of keeping Mott back from whatever abyss of depression was threatening her.

  Then there was Bill Angel: tough, competent, but restless — a pilot, Benacerraf thought, without any piloting to do, for two thousand days. Of all of them it was Angel who had most rebelled against their daily regime, bitching at the others and Mission Control in Houston. He was a monkey rattling the bars of his cage.

  And as for herself, Benacerraf tried to avoid too much introversion, as she had throughout her life. She, like Angel, felt the chafing frustration of being stuck in here with nothing meaningful to do.

  Early in the mission, during the euphoria that had followed their hair-raising launch and injection onto this long interplanetary trajectory — and the delight of becoming the first humans to leave cislunar space — they had all been a lot more sociable with each other. They had made a point, for example, of planning meal times to be together.

  But that had worn off as soon as the dull daily slog of the mission unfolded.

  She’d read of Antarctic scientists who, after a winter snowed into their huts, would throw open the doors as soon as spring came, and just walk off, heading so far into the distance, away from each other, that they might disappear over the horizon.

  The crew of Discovery, in their space-going shack, faced a winter that would last six long years. As far as Benacerraf was concerned, anything that they found to help them all endure that and keep from driving each other crazy, like fragments of privacy and broken-up shift patterns, was fine by her.

  She pressed her eye to the coelostat eyepiece. The coelostat, an old British invention, was an arrangement of spinning mirrors that compensated for the whirl of the centrifuge, and the barbecue roll of Discovery, to deliver a reasonably steady telescopic view.

  She had the coelostat centered on Earth and Moon. The image was slightly blurred, and prone to drift.

  Discovery’s trajectory was a complicated double orbit around the sun, in which she would complete two passes past Venus, and then a final close approach to Earth, coming within a few hundred miles of the surface, achieving powerful gravity assists each time.

  Only then, after two years, having accumulated the velocity its chemical rockets could not impart, would Discovery leave the inner Solar System behind, and be hurled towards Jupiter — for a further assist — and on to Saturn.

  Thus, right now, Discovery was spiralling in towards the sun, on its way to the first rendezvous with Venus. But the energy provided by its injection burn was so low that the ship’s orbit was pretty much tracking that of Earth around the sun, drawing almost imperceptibly away from the home world, in towards the solar fire. So even now, after eighty days, Earth and Moon showed fat, gibbous discs, their faces turned in parallel to the sun. The blue-white of Earth was much brighter, almost overwhelming the faint brown sheen of its smaller companion.

  Benacerraf could still study Earth. She was looking at the area from Tibet across Mongolia: northern China and the Gobi desert, one of the bleakest, most barren parts of the planet.

  Her perspective was evolving, as Earth receded.

  She’d tried to follow, even participate in, the inquisitions that had followed the Endeavour launch. The country had gone into a kind of weary agony when it had been discovered that the X-15 operation had been mounted by a rogue USAF faction, and heads were rolling. There seemed to be a mood of sourness among the public, engendered by the X-15 incident, as if NASA and the USAF were all of a piece. And besides — as Jackie had predicted — the public had rapidly grown bored with the unchanging news from space.

 
; Xavier Maclachlan was growing ever stronger, his lead in the polls consolidating. Jake Hadamard was already fighting a rearguard action to maintain the RLV and other programs he had started, in the wake of the Columbia crash.

  It became steadily harder to believe that there would ever be a meaningful attempt at a retrieval.

  But it was too late to turn back. Benacerraf had committed herself to traversing this long dark tunnel, leading only to the frigid wastes of Titan. And she suspected she’d always known — in her heart of hearts — it would turn out this way.

  But it grew harder to care, as the radio voices grew fainter, buzzing like wasps in a jar. Even Jackie’s irregular, begrudged messages seemed to be losing their power to hurt her.

  Earth was irrelevant, now; America was simply the crucible within which this mission had been forged. She was glad to leave it all behind, she was deciding; in many ways she preferred her new life here, cooped up in this handful of dimly lit, sour-smelling compartments, the confines of the ship her only reality, the cool logic of Newton’s laws her only constraint.

  After a time, she pushed away the coelostat eyepiece.

  She cycled for her regulation four hours.

  Discovery was moving at a little more than Earth’s escape velocity, seven miles a second. So, Benacerraf figured, while she had been cycling Discovery had crossed around a hundred thousand miles: nearly half the distance between Earth and Moon. It would be something to radio back to her grandsons.

  With a shuddering whir, the centrifuge began to slow. Soon, the cabin had snuggled against the docking node.

  The day eroded to its close.

  Her sleeping restraint was just a bag fastened against the wall of her quarters, her little rounded-door compartment on the starboard side of the hab module. Sometimes she was cold, because the sleep compartments were ventilated to the point of being draughty. There wasn’t much choice about that, because otherwise, in the absence of convection, she could suffocate in the lingering carbon dioxide of her own breath. But at first she’d found the ventilation stream was blowing up into her face, into her mouth and nose, making her feel chilled to the bone. So, defying the local vertical, she’d turned her sleeping bag around. But now the draft tended to blow up into her sleeping bag, making it billow around her, and dissipating the warmth generated by her body…

  Besides, the hab module was full of noise.

  She wasn’t disturbed by the whine of the pumps and fans of the air conditioning system. That was a comforting, surrounding susurrus. But as the sun approached, the heat made Discovery expand and contract, popping and banging like a tin roof. And whenever Discovery’s RCS thrusters fired, making some automated tweak to the trajectory, it sounded like machine gun fire.

  She’d adapt, she expected. She had, after all, two and a half thousand days to get used to this.

  To unwind, she read her book.

  It was science fiction, a lightweight paperback. There were whole libraries stored on CD-ROM, of course, but she’d never gotten used to reading online, even on softscreens. She’d brought this book, and a handful of others, along with her in her Personal Preference Kit.

  (…Actually the books had had to be tested for their flammability; she’d had to give up a couple of her precious old paperbacks, to let engineers at JSC set fire to them. Oddly, books didn’t burn so well. The engineers called them ablators. Each page had to be on fire before the next inwards reached its scorching point, and so the books would protect themselves, shedding heat by discarding pages, like a spacecraft entering an atmosphere…)

  The book was 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur Clarke, a yellowing paperback from 1971. She wasn’t a sci-fi buff, but this book had always been a favorite.

  It charmed her that this wonderful old book also featured another ship called Discovery, heading for the moons of Saturn. But Clarke’s nuclear-powered Discovery was all of four hundred feet long, and in its pressure hull, a spacious hall thirty-five feet across, a carousel rotated fast enough to simulate lunar gravity. (Too small, she thought wistfully; Poole and Bowman would have been knocked sideways by Coriolis, and spent their lives throwing up.)

  The truth was, she thought sadly, 2001 had come and gone, and the book, like the work of Wells and Verne before, had mutated into a period-piece, a description of a lost alternate world. But at least, she thought, she had been spared Hal.

  She let go of the book. It drifted off into the air like a yellowing bird, and the residual strength of its cracked spine closed it up, losing her place.

  It had been a pretty good day. She’d managed to get through the whole, of it without encountering the others once.

  She closed her eyes.

  * * *

  In the end, the launch actually brought Barbara Fahy some favorable publicity. NASA’s PAO presented her as the woman who had lost Columbia, but who had redeemed herself by making the right decisions when rogue USAF officers had tried to shoot down Endeavour. It was a neat feel-good story. Even if not everyone agreed that those USAF assholes had gone rogue.

  Hadamard promoted her out of Building 30, to a more senior program management role. But she found her time occupied by PR: TV interviews and newspaper profiles and goodwill tours.

  Hadamard even asked her to accompany him to China.

  Thus she found herself as part of a NASA-USAF party, headed up by Hadamard, on a goodwill visit to the Xi Chang launch center. Incredibly, Al Hartle came along, the notorious Chinese-basher who everyone suspected was at the heart of the X-15 plot. But Hartle was a close ally of Xavier Maclachlan, and in exercises like this, many constituencies had to be pacified.

  They were flown into the sprawling city of Chengdu, at the heart of the green and mountainous Sichuan province, and then driven in a fleet of air-conditioned limousines toward the launch center. There, they would be met by Jiang Ling, the first of China’s dozen or so astronauts, who Fahy had gotten to know a little during her trip to Houston three years earlier.

  Looking around the car at her companions — Hadamard’s passive stare, Hartle’s ferocious, paranoid bald-eagle scowl — she suspected that none of them really wanted to be here. This “friendship” tour was an empty gesture.

  But the gesture was the whole point.

  The White House had more or less forced this trip on NASA and the Air Force. Every poll indicated that Maclachlan was going to storm the election at the end of the year, and after that all bets were off; the outgoing Administration wanted to do whatever it could to cement Sino-American relations while it had the chance, before Maclachlan started building walls around the nation. Fahy applauded the motive; one look at Hartle’s body language today was enough to show her how fragile any kind of China-U.S. accord was likely to be.

  But the huge reality of China soon began to overwhelm Fahy, diminishing the internal calculations of the Americans to absurdity.

  The heart of Chengdu was impressive, but the city was choked by a huge shanty-town, a constricting girdle of wood and paper snacks. Children sprawled by the roadside. They stared at the cars, their bare bellies swollen, their palms lifted to their pretty, empty faces in the universal sign for “please.”

  Out of the conurbation itself the convoy entered the eternal Chinese countryside. Fahy caught high-speed glimpses of peasants, scratching at the soil, as their forebears must have done for centuries. China was crowded: everywhere there were more people than she had expected — impossibly many of them, working in the dried-out paddies or stumbling along the fringe of the highways or squatting by the road.

  Fahy was stunned by her glimpses of the immensity of the Chinese landscape, the huge human resources of the nation.

  Like most modern Americans, she had never set foot outside the U.S. before, even though she had worked on a mission to another planet. But she was shamed to find how little she had really seen and understood of her own world.

  The space center itself was little more than twenty years old. It had been designed as China’s door to geosynchronous orbit, u
sing its Long March fleet. The center was cupped by green-clad hills. The sky was blue, the air fresh and clear; the party were taken around by car and golf-cart buggy.

  There were buildings for the horizontal assembly and checkout of Long March boosters, payload preparation bays, and a string of compact-looking launch pads, strung out along a rail line. Fahy endured the usual mind-numbing visits to propellant charging and draining facilities, cryogenic handling systems, pyrotechnics stores, the launch control center.

  There was a heroic-pose statue of Jiang Ling. But there was no sign of any memorial to Chen Muqi, the third Chinese to be launched — officially — who had been killed when his oak-resin heatshield failed during reentry.

  They were shown a proud display of China’s proposed Moon landing system. The Chinese weren’t planning to build a huge Saturn V-class booster. Their strategy would be based on smaller boosters and Earth orbit rendezvous: assembly of the Moon ship in Earth orbit. There was a little plastic mock-up of structures on the Moon’s surface: a proud lunar lander, hauntingly like the Apollo Lunar Module of four decades earlier, a compact surface shelter half-buried in the regolith, the Chinese flag surrounded by four or five toy astronauts.

  Despite setbacks, the Chinese still claimed they believed they could achieve all this by 2019 — the fiftieth anniversary of Apollo 11. Al Hartle growled at this, looking chagrined.

  Fahy saw no reason to suppose the Chinese couldn’t achieve their target. Especially since the Chinese were adopting a strategy which some argued the Americans should have followed all along: to drop any attempt at perfect reliability, to accept lower-cost, more practical solutions — and the heroic deaths that would inevitably accompany them.

  Such losses seemed to be acceptable here.

  The party was hurried quickly away from any areas of technical sensitivity; the tour was actually, she thought, as shallow as a tourists’ visit to the Cape.

  She grew bored, restless. She disliked spending her time as a mute geopolitical symbol.