Titan

by Bova, Ben

  That atmosphere is composed mainly of nitrogen, laced with hydrocarbons such as methane, ethane and propane, plus nitrogen-carbon compounds such as hydrogen cyanide, cyanogen, and cyanoacetelyne. Shine sunlight on such an atmosphere and you get the same result you would in Los Angeles or Tokyo or Mexico City: photochemical smog, induced by solar ultraviolet light. Titan is a smog-covered world. Its predominantly orange coloring is due to this smog, which blankets Titan and makes it necessary for observations of its surface to be done in infrared wavelengths, which penetrate the smog, rather than visible light, which does not.

  The incoming solar ultraviolet light, together with energetic electrons from nearby Saturn’s powerful magnetosphere, produce complex chemical reactions high in Titan’s thick atmosphere. Organic polymers called tholins are created, to drift downward deeper into the atmosphere and eventually fall onto the moon’s surface: black snow.

  Laboratory experiments on Earth showed that tholins, when dissolved in liquid water, yield amino acids, which are the building-block molecules of proteins and thus fundamental to life.

  Orbiting more than a million kilometers from Saturn, which in turn lies twice as far from the Sun as Jupiter and ten times farther from the Sun than the Earth does, Titan’s surface temperature averages -183° Celsius. Titan is cold, too cold to have liquid water on its surface—except when a region might be heated temporarily by a volcanic eruption or the impact of a meteor. Or if the water is mixed with an antifreeze compound, such as ammonia or ethane derivatives.

  Titan’s density is not quite twice that of water, which means that its body must be composed largely of ices—frozen water and/or frozen methane—with perhaps a small rocky core beneath a thick icy mantle.

  Despite Titan’s low temperature, liquid droplets of ethane can form in its atmosphere and rain down onto the frigid surface, collecting as lakes or perhaps larger seas. There are streams of ethane (or ethane-laced water) carving out channels across the ground of ices. Several sizable seas of hydrocarbon-crusted liquid methane dot the moon’s surface.

  Titan rotates on its axis in slightly less than sixteen Earth days, the same period as its orbit around Saturn. Thus Titan is “locked” in its rotation so that it always presents the same face to its planet, Saturn, just as our Moon presents the same face to Earth. But even a “locked” moon wobbles slightly in its orbit, and Titan’s rotation is perturbed slightly by its sizable neighbors, the moons Rhea and Hyperion, each of which is close to 1,500 kilometers in diameter. Titan rocks slightly back and forth as it orbits Saturn, a ponderous wobbling that creates strange tides in its hydrocarbon seas.

  A world rich in carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen. A world where raindrops of ethane and sooty flakes of tholins fall from the smoggy sky. A world that contains rivers and streams of ethane or ethane-laced water, and methane seas. Although it is a very cold world, a primitive form of microbial cryogenic biology was found to exist on Titan’s surface by the earliest automated probes from distant Earth. Could there be a more sophisticated biosphere, perhaps deeper underground?

  And there are large swaths of dark material carpeting parts of Titan’s surface. Early probes showed that they are rich in carbon compounds. Fields of frozen petroleum? Patches of solidified hydrocarbons? Swales of black tholin snowbanks piled on ground that is too cold for them to melt?

  Or something else?

  24 DECEMBER 2095: CHRISTMAS EVE PARTY

  Eduoard Urbain smiled uneasily as he shook hands, one by one, with each member of his scientific and engineering staffs. They shuffled themselves into a reception line the moment he entered the auditorium, like serfs of old lining up with their hats in their hands to receive the Christmas blessing of their lord and master.

  Jeanmarie, standing beside him, smiled graciously and spoke a few words to every man and woman presented to her. She is wonderful, Urbain thought, as he shook hand after hand. She is in her element, kind and warm and loving. I would be lost without her. The line seemed endless, and Urbain struggled to find something worth saying, something more than “Merry Christmas” endlessly repeated.

  At last it was done. Urbain rubbed his numbed hand and looked out over the assembly. Two hundred men and women, he thought. One hundred and ninety-four, to be precise. It is such a small number to run the scientific investigation of Saturn, its rings, and its moons. But when you must greet each one individually it seems like a very large number indeed.

  Nadia Wunderly was one of the last persons that Urbain had greeted. She was the maverick among his scientists, and although she had brought Urbain sudden and unexpected success, he still regarded her with a mixture of disquiet and, yes, jealousy. She had refused to follow his orders and join the others in the study of Titan. Instead she had focused single-mindedly on Saturn’s rings. And discovered organisms living in their particles of ice. A great discovery, if it held true. Wexler and her ICU lackeys seemed to harbor some doubts about Wunderly’s claim.

  Now Wunderly drifted from the reception line to the makeshift bar that had been set up along the base of the auditorium’s stage. She was a young woman, not yet thirty, with a rather pretty heart-shaped face. Urbain thought she would look even prettier if she stopped dying her hair brick red and let it grow normally instead of chopping it into those ridiculous barbs; her hair looked like the spiked end of a medieval bludgeon. She was wearing her usual dark tunic and slacks, which was unfortunate: Her figure was ample, too ample for his taste. Buxom, yes, but also heavyset, thick in the waist and limbs.

  He mentally compared her to his wife. Slim and elegant, Jeanmarie would commit suicide before letting herself gain that much weight.

  Wunderly was also looking at Jeanmarie Urbain. Slim as a stylus, she thought. One of those lucky women who had a metabolism that burned calories faster than she could ingest them. Probably never had to diet a day in her life. She can wear those frilly dresses and look gorgeous in them. I’d look like a hippopotamus in a tutu.

  But that’s all changing, Wunderly told herself. I’ve dropped five kilos in the past two weeks and I’m going to lose another three before New Year’s Eve. Now for the real test.

  One of the guys behind the bar offered her a cup of eggnog. Wunderly almost took it before she pulled her hand back and asked for mineral water, instead.

  The guy—one of the technicians who worked with the Titan Alpha engineers—grinned at her. “One glass of genuine recycled local aitch-two-oh, courtesy of the waste management department,” he said cheerfully, handing her a glass.

  Wunderly grinned at him. “You can’t scare me.”

  He grinned back. “Ho, ho, ho and all that, Nadia.”

  “Same to you,” she said, then walked away from the bar, into the milling throng.

  The speakers set up at either end of the stage were pouring out syrupy Christmas tunes. Somehow they made Wunderly feel sad. Have yourself a merry little Christmas. Sure. A billion kilometers from home. Well, at least I can go home when I’m ready. Most of the poor slobs in this habitat can’t.

  Then she saw him, standing by himself off in the corner where the stage met the auditorium’s side wall. Squaring her shoulders like a soldier heading into battle, she pushed through the crowd at the bar and went toward her target.

  Da’ud Habib was chief of the computer group. He didn’t look like the other computer geeks, scruffy and rumpled. He was wearing a crisply pressed red sport shirt over his slacks. Sandals, though, and no socks. Actually he was almost kind of handsome, Wunderly thought. He kept the dark little beard that fringed his jaw neat and trim. His eyes were a deep liquid brown. But he was pretty much of a loner, a quiet guy. His ancestry was Arabic, she knew. She had looked up his dossier: he’d been born and raised in Vancouver, in a Moslem neighborhood, but he was more Canadian than anything else. At least, she hoped so.

  “Hi,” she said, as soon as she was close enough.

  He looked a little surprised. “Hello.”

  “I’m Nadia Wunderly.”

  “I know. You f
ound the creatures in the rings.”

  Nadia smiled her best. “That’s me. Lord of the rings, they call me.”

  He smiled back uncertainly. “Er, shouldn’t it be ‘lady of the rings’?”

  “Literary license.”

  “Ah. I see.”

  “Is it okay to wish you a Merry Christmas?”

  “Of course. I’m not anti-Christian. I’ve always enjoyed the Christmas season; the shopping, the music, all that.”

  Wunderly took a sip of her water. Habib was drinking something that looked fizzy to her. Probably nonalcoholic, she thought.

  “You’re Da’ud Habib, aren’t you?”

  “Oh! I should have introduced myself. I’m sorry.”

  “No problem. You’re chief of the computing group, right?”

  “Lord of the nerds, yes.”

  She laughed and he laughed with her.

  “Big day tomorrow,” she said, trying to figure out how to turn the conversation into the path she wanted.

  Habib nodded again. “Urbain’s Christmas present to himself.”

  She took a breath and plunged ahead. “The New Year’s Eve party is a week from tonight.”

  “Oh? Yes, I suppose so.”

  “Are you going?”

  He looked almost alarmed by her question. He actually backed away from her a step. “Me? I … I hadn’t thought about it.”

  Wunderly could hear her pulse thumping in her ears. Stepping closer to Habib, she asked, “Would you like to go with me? I mean, I don’t have a date for the party and I thought we could go together.”

  His brow wrinkled slightly and she held her breath.

  “Go with you?” It seemed like a totally new idea to him, something he would never have thought of by himself.

  Don’t make me beg, she pleaded silently.

  He seemed to understand, or maybe see it in her eyes. “Why, yes, I suppose so. I wasn’t planning on going …” He brightened slowly and smiled again, wider this time. “But why not? I’d be happy to go with you.”

  Wunderly wanted to laugh with delight, but she reined herself in and said merely, “Great! Then it’s a date.”

  25 DECEMBER 2095: MISSION CONTROL CENTER

  Christmas morning, but no one on the scientific staff was taking a holiday. Not yet. The mission control center was never meant to hold so many people, Urbain thought nervously, as he stood sandwiched between Dr. Wexler and Professor Wilmot. The morning shift of technicians had to worm their way through the crowd to get to their consoles. Packed in behind the last row of the consoles, the university notables and news executives stood shoulder to shoulder, making the chamber hot, sweaty with the press of their bodies. Their murmured conversations sounded like the drone of insects on a summer day from Urbain’s childhood in Quebec.

  He felt as edgy as a twitching rabbit, especially with Wexler standing beside him and some three dozen other guests squeezed into the control center. Even the redoubtable Pancho Lane, the newly retired industrialist, had flown out to Saturn for this momentous event. The only lights in the circular chamber came from the screens on the control staff’s consoles. Urbain looked up at their flickering reflections on the dark, blank wall screen to see Professor Wilmot, smiling expectantly beside him.

  “The first data from your surface probe,” said Wexler, beaming at him. “This is a memorable Christmas for science, Eduoard.”

  Urbain nodded tightly. He was a short, wiry man, the kind who never worried about his weight because everything he ate turned into nervous energy. His dark hair was slicked straight back from his high forehead, his beard was neatly trimmed. As he had yesterday, he wore his best suit for this moment; after all, half the people crammed into the control center were from the news media.

  The high and mighty of the International Consortium of Universities had not always smiled upon Eduoard Urbain. When this expedition to Saturn had started nearly three years earlier, Urbain was regarded as a second-rater, a competent worker but no blazing star. He was chosen to head the scientific staff that rode the immense habitat Goddard out to Saturn to take up a polar orbit about the ringed planet because Urbain and his team were regarded merely as caretakers, meant only to make routine observations and babysit the scientific equipment during Goddard’s slow, two-year voyage out to Saturn. Once the habitat was safely in orbit there, the world’s top planetary scientists would dash out on a fusion torch ship to take up the tasks of investigating Saturn and, more important, its giant moon, Titan.

  As far as Urbain was concerned, however, the ten thousand men and women who made up Goddard’s self-contained community existed solely to service the handful of scientists and engineers under his authority. Urbain spent almost every waking moment of those two years driving his engineering staff to build Titan Alpha—his dream, the offspring of his mind, the product of his lifelong hope. Part spacecraft, part armored tractor, Titan Alpha was meant to carry the most sophisticated sensors and computers conceivable to the surface of Titan and use them to explore that frigid, smog-shrouded world under real-time control from scientists in Goddard.

  Even as he built the massive exploratory vehicle, Urbain knew in his heart that other, more prominent scientists would be the ones to use it, to guide it across Titan’s fields of ice, to gain glory and recognition out of his sweat and toil. An accident changed all that, one of those accidents that dot the history of scientific research. Nadia Wunderly, one of Urbain’s lowly assistants and a stubborn woman at best, insisted on studying Saturn’s rings. The rest of his scientific team was focused exclusively on Titan, for that massive moon was known to bear life, microscopic organisms that lived in the petrochemical soup that covered part of Titan’s icy surface.

  Wunderly discovered what might have been a new form of living organism dwelling in Saturn’s rings. As her director, Urbain received much of the credit for this revelation. And, perversely, won the right to direct Titan Alpha in its exploration of the giant moon’s surface.

  Now he basked in the attention of the solar system’s most important scientists as his creation, his offspring, his dream come true—Titan Alpha—began to send data from its sensors on the frozen surface of Titan.

  Urbain held his breath. The jam-packed control center went eerily silent.

  The wall screen lit up to show: SYSTEMS ACTIVATION.

  Deep inside Titan Alpha’s armored hide, its central computer began to receive commands through its downlink antenna.

  Command: Systems activation.

  Communications downlink confirmed. Code accepted. Systems activation procedures initiated.

  Main power on.

  Auxiliary power standing by.

  Central computer self-checking. Self-check completed. Central computer functional.

  Command: Check structural integrity.

  Initiating structural integrity check. Outer shell intact. Structural members intact. No deformities beyond allowable limits. interior compartments intact and pressurized.

  Command: Test propulsion system.

  Propulsion system test initiated. Reactor within nominal limits. Main engine within nominal limits. Drive wheels functional but not engaged. Plates four-fourteen through four-twenty-two of left forward tread slightly deformed but within operational limits.

  Command: Retract descent parachute shroud.

  Descent parachute shroud retracted.

  Command: Retract descent retro rocket pod.

  Descent retro rocket pod retracted.

  Command: Activate sensors.

  Sensors activated.

  Command: Uplink sensor data.

  UPLINK SENSOR DATA.

  Except for those bright yellow block letters the main wall screen in the command center remained blank. Several seconds ticked by. Urbain felt perspiration break out on his brow. Wexler, the ICU president, stirred uneasily. Muttering broke out in the crowd behind Urbain’s back. He even heard a hurtful snicker.

  A full minute passed.

  “We should be receiving data,” Urbain s
aid in a deathly whisper.

  Wexler said nothing.

  “Is it workin’?” a woman asked loudly. Pancho Lane, Urbain realized.

  DATA UPLINK ABORTED.

  Urbain stared at the words, hard and bright on the dark blue background of the wall screen. My death sentence, he said to himself. It would have been kinder to take a pistol and shoot me through my head.

  25 DECEMBER 2095: CHRISTMAS DINNER

  You mean nothing came through?” Kris Cardenas asked.

  “Not a damn thing,” said Pancho. “The probe went silent soon’s they ordered the data uplink.”

  This Christmas dinner in the habitat’s quiet little Bistro restaurant had been intended as a reunion. Pancho hadn’t seen Cardenas in nearly five years.

  Holly had brought her friend, a silent, morose-looking young man named Raoul Tavalera. With his long, horsy face and mistrustful brown eyes he reminded Pancho of Eeyore, from the old Winnie-the-Pooh vids. Tavalera said very little; he just sat beside Holly looking sad, sullen, worried. It’s Christmas, Pancho scolded him silently. Lighten up, for cripes’ sake. But Holly seemed quite happy with the lug. No accounting for taste, Pancho thought. Maybe he’s good in bed.

  Wanamaker sat beside Pancho, while Cardenas had brought a hunky guy wearing faded jeans and a mesh shirt that showed off his pecs nicely. She introduced him as Manuel Gaeta.

  “The stunt guy?” Pancho had asked, recognizing his rugged, slightly beat up face.

  “Retired stunt guy,” Gaeta had replied with an easy smile.

  “You flew through the rings of Saturn,” said Wanamaker in his deep gravelly voice, “without a spacecraft.”

  “I was wearing a suit. A pretty special suit.”

  “The ice creatures that live in the rings almost killed Manny,” Cardenas said. “At one point he was totally encased in ice.”