by Bova, Ben
He looked outward toward the horizon. “Not a star in the sky, not even a glow to mark where the Sun is. Wait. There’s a smudge of something up there. Saturn, maybe. It’s just too cloudy to see anything clearly.”
Not much of a scenic view for the customers, Gaeta thought.
Fritz’s voice startled him out of his sightseeing. “Urbain wants to talk to you.”
“Fine. Patch him through.”
Several seconds of hesitation, then Urbain’s tight, tense voice. “Mr. Gaeta, your equipment includes a diagnostic probe for the uplink antenna.”
“Right,” he replied. “Got it right here on my belt.” He patted the pouch at his waist with a gloved hand.
“Please connect the probe to the antenna’s maintenance receptacle.”
“Okay.”
It was clumsy, digging the pencil-slim diagnostic probe from the pouch with his gloved hand. Gaeta nearly dropped the slender cylinder. Then he had to kneel down in the suit, no easy task, to insert the probe into the antenna’s test slot.
“Done,” he said at last, blinking sweat from his eyes.
“Good. Please activate the probe.”
“Activating.”
Urbain leaned forward in his desk chair, watching on his desktop display as Gaeta connected the probe to the antenna testing circuitry.
The antenna’s circuit schematic flashed onto the display screen. No breaks, Urbain saw. Current is flowing through the circuit as designed. The antenna is functional. There’s nothing wrong with it.
Licking his lips nervously, Urbain commanded, “Uplink stored data,” speaking as clearly as he knew how. His command was relayed at the speed of light to the control center, then to the commsats in orbit around Titan and finally to Alpha’s central computer.
Nearly twelve seconds ticked by, as slowly as drops of blood dripping from a wound.
Uplink command aborted.
The words burned on Urbain’s display screen like a branding iron searing his flesh.
His voice quavering slightly, Urbain repeated, “Uplink all stored data.”
Uplink command aborted.
Urbain pounded a fist on his desk so hard that pain shot up the length of his arm.
He saw the yellow message light begin to blink in the lower corner of his screen. The data bar running along the screen’s bottom showed it was Habib, calling from the control center. “Answer,” Urbain gasped, rubbing his throbbing arm.
“Dr. Urbain,” said Habib, his neatly bearded face filling the screen, erasing the damning words. “We should link with the master program. Only the master program has the option of aborting commands.”
Urbain closed his eyes momentarily. Then, as calmly as he could, he replied, “Very well. Tell the stuntman to link with the master program.”
28 MAY 2096: INTERFACE
Timoshenko had a thundering headache as he walked deliberately down the corridor that led to the airlock. He’d drunk himself into a stupor the night before, sitting alone in his threadbare apartment drinking vodka concocted at one of the farms and sold clandestinely throughout the habitat. One bottle hadn’t been enough to dull the pain that surged through him like a flow of red-hot lava, so he started in on a second. As he struggled with its plastic stopper he noticed that there were no more bottles in the kitchen cabinet. He’d bought six, he distinctly remembered. Well, he told himself, I’ll have to find the guy who sells them and buy a few more.
Or maybe not. Maybe, he thought, I have enough to last me the rest of my life.
“Link with the master program?” Gaeta asked.
He didn’t recognize Habib’s voice, but whoever it was that was speaking to him, the guy seemed to know what he was talking about.
“You’ve been briefed on connecting with the central computer,” Habib said, half questioning.
“Yeah, right,” Gaeta said. “But what about the uplink antenna? You want me to unload the nanos and build a new one for you?”
The twelve-second hesitation was getting on Gaeta’s nerves. You ask a question and then wait. I could get flattened by an asteroid before they come up with the frickin’ answer.
“No, not at this time. Keep the nanos bottled. We need to connect with the master program first.”
“Okay, amigo, I’m movin’ to the central computer port.”
Gaeta pulled the diagnostic probe out of the uplink antenna circuit and stuffed it back into the pouch at his waist. Instead of getting to his feet, he found it easier to crawl on his hands and knees from the front edge of Alpha’s roof to its center. There was a panel built into the roof that opened to give access to the various computer ports. Sitting in an awkward sprawl, Gaeta leaned forward to open the panel and, checking with the information displays flickering against his visor, he located the central computer’s access port and fished his communications line from its pouch on the waist of his suit. He felt the connector’s end click into the access port.
Before he could say a syllable, a shrill electronic screech filled his helmet, piercing, so loud that Gaeta clapped his hands to the sides of the helmet in pain. Fumbling for the volume control inside his suit he turned down the volume on the earphones, but still the scream cut through his brain like a surgeon’s drill. Teeth gritted, he clamped his lips shut to stop the cry of agony that his body wanted to scream.
After several hours-long moments the shriek stopped. Gaeta was panting, sweating. It took him several more thumping heartbeats before he could gasp, “Is … is that what you wanted?”
He mentally counted the seconds until Habib replied excitedly, “Yes, yes, exactly right! You have accessed the master program.”
Great, he thought. Almost blew my frickin’ head off. Aloud, he asked, “Okay, now what?”
Again he waited while the ringing in his ears eased a little. “We need to analyze the program’s response. This is the first time the computer has responded to an input in more than three months.”
Lucky me, Gaeta said to himself. Squinting out beyond the edge of the rover’s roof, he saw that the clouds covering the sky were almost the color of chocolate: muddy, dismal, depressing. They bulged thickly overhead like the bellies of pregnant elephants. In the farthest distance a sheet of black was falling to the ground.
“How long is this gonna take?” he asked.
Habib finally answered, “Several hours, at least. Perhaps several days.”
“Days?” Gaeta screeched. “I’ve only got an hour down here. Less. Fifty-one minutes.”
Berkowitz was in the communications building’s broadcast studio monitoring Gaeta’s visual and audio transmissions from Titan’s surface. His smart wall screen displayed what Gaeta’s helmet cameras showed, and he had borrowed one of Urbain’s planetary scientists to give a running commentary on what Gaeta was experiencing. She had no other responsibilities as long as Alpha was not sending up sensor data, so she had jumped at the chance to be, as Berkowitz had dramatically put it, “the voice of mission control.”
Seated before the cameras at a tiny desk in front of a fake bookcase, she was commenting, “The ground is frozen, from the looks of it, and covered with a dark, slushy methane snow. The roundish boulders are made of water ice, not stone. Those shards sticking up out of the ground might be water ice, too. The weather is pretty normal for Titan: one hundred and ninety-two degrees below zero, with a thick overcast and a snowstorm of black, carbon-based tholins approaching the area.”
Snowstorm? Berkowitz’s ears perked up. Could that be dangerous? He turned to the keyboard on his desk and typed SNOW DANGER? The words immediately appeared on the flat screen built into the top of the commentator’s curved desk.
She glanced over at Berkowitz then, with a bit of a forced smile, turned back to the camera. “Tholin storms are commonplace on Titan. The flakes are black and they cut down on visibility quite a lot. Tholins are carbon-based particles, somewhat like plastics manufactured …”
Berkowitz stopped listening. The latest audience figures were scrolling across
his wall screen’s data bar. He grinned widely. Between the audiences on Earth and on the Moon, he saw, we’ve already hit a billion. Money in the bank.
And, he thought, if Gaeta gets into some kind of trouble down there the ratings will go even higher.
Habib could hear the shocked surprise in Gaeta’s voice.
“Days? I’ve only got an hour down here. Less. Fifty-one minutes.”
“I know,” he said. “I understand.” His eyes were on the alphanumerics scrolling across his console screen. The master computer was communicating easily enough, but it was only general housekeeping information, not the data from the sensors that Urbain so desperately wanted.
The answer is somewhere in those symbols, Habib was certain. It’s got to be! But where? It will take days to scan through all of it, to find where the problem lay.
“Hey!” Gaeta snapped impatiently. “I don’t have more’n another fifty minutes before this suit starts to run dry. When that happens, I’ve got to leave.”
“Please be patient,” Habib replied, feeling annoyed. “We’ll start analyzing the program’s response right away.”
He looked around at the other consoles. His own trio of computer analysts was already huddled together, eagerly tracing the response from Alpha. Gaeta’s mission control technicians were clustered at a single console off in the corner of the control center. Strange that Urbain isn’t here, Habib thought. He must be following this from his office.
“Patience my butt,” Gaeta grumbled. “I’m not gonna die down here.”
“No, no, of course not,” Habib said mechanically. But he was thinking, Is there some way we can speed up the analysis? Some way to break through to the master program’s reason for shutting down the sensor uplink?
“We must determine why the data uplink was aborted,” he said, trying to explain the problem. “All of Alpha’s systems seem to be functioning as designed and now we know that the uplink antenna is not physically damaged. The problem is with the central computer’s master program, I’m certain of it.”
Look for anomalies, Habib told himself even as he was speaking to Gaeta. He looked out at the other consoles; all their screens were filled with the central computer’s data flow. The control center buzzed with nervous energy now. The engineers had something to do, a task to accomplish, and they were all bending over their screens, searching for answers. Habib was certain that somewhere in the master program was a contradiction, a programming error. We’ve got to find it, he told himself.
The lean, spare man who was head of Gaeta’s team of technicians was walking purposively toward him. Von Helmholtz looked determined, humorless, like an inflexible schoolmaster or the martinet who commands a squad of elite commandos.
Gaeta’s voice came through the console’s speaker. “So why don’t you ask the fregado computer why it’s screwed up?”
Habib felt his brows shoot up. “What? What did you say?”
Before Gaeta had a chance to hear his question and reply, von Helmholtz leaned over Habib’s shoulder and said stiffly, “He has only forty-seven minutes to remain safely on the ground. After that we must extract him, bring him back to the transfer vessel.”
Habib nodded. “I understand.”
Gaeta repeated, “I said, why don’t you ask the computer why it shut down the data uplink.” He sounded irritated. Fritz stared at the speaker’s minuscule grill. Gaeta continued, “I mean, the computer’s got voice recognition circuitry, doesn’t it?”
Habib stared at von Helmholtz who, surprisingly, made a tight little smile.
“He’s no fool,” Fritz whispered.
Habib pointed to an extra chair at the next console; Fritz pulled it up and sat next to him.
“We could interrogate the central computer,” he said to Gaeta, “but the questioning would have to go through you. You are linked to the computer; our connection is indirect, through you.”
“Is that the best you can do?” von Helmholtz asked.
Shrugging, Habib replied, “We expected that once we had reestablished contact with the central computer we could analyze its responses.”
“And Manuel would leave the communications gear plugged in to the comm port after he left, is that it?”
“Yes, but if we can interrogate the master program directly, there’s a voice subroutine built into it. We might be able to get to the heart of the problem before he has to leave.”
Gaeta’s voice came back. “Okay, you tell me what to ask the computer. I’ll be your dueña.”
“Dueña?” Habib felt puzzled.
“Go-between,” said von Helmholtz. “Translator. He’s using the term quite loosely.”
Nodding, Habib said into his console microphone, “Good. We’ll send you the questions that we want to ask the computer.”
“This isn’t going to be easy,” von Helmholtz said. “And you have less than forty-six minutes for the task.”
But Habib felt buoyant. We can access the master program’s self-diagnostic routine, he thought. Perhaps we can solve this problem in less than forty-six minutes.
Timoshenko, meanwhile, was pulling on his hard suit. He had thought about sending a final message to Katrina, something like Cyrano de Bergerac’s, “Farewell, Roxanne, for today I die.” But then he thought better of it. Too melodramatic. Why burden her with it? They probably won’t even tell her I’m dead.
Then he realized, Of course she’ll know. When the news reaches Earth that the entire habitat was killed off, she’ll know I’m dead.
Maybe Katrina will cry for me, he thought. That’s the most I can hope for now.
28 MAY 2096: CONTACT
Sitting spraddle-legged on Alpha’s roof, Gaeta counted the seconds until Habib’s reply. In the distance he saw the black snowstorm approaching, a wall of inky darkness. He pulled both his arms inside the suit’s chest cavity again and flicked through his life-support diagnostics. Everything okay, he saw. No malfs. Got more’n six hours of air and water, with recycling.
The yellow light of his comm system’s alternate frequency began blinking for attention. Gaeta said, “Freak two,” and Berkowitz’s voice came through his earphones. “Can you give us some first-hand impressions of Titan?” Gaeta could almost hear the man’s perpetual smile in the tone of his voice.
What the hell, he thought. I got nothing better to do until the geniuses in the control center start sending me the questions they want to ask.
“Okay,” he said, looking out toward the horizon again. “The first impression you get down here on the surface of Titan is gloom and darkness. This place looks like a midwinter day in northern Manitoba. Only colder, a lot colder. Clouds cover the sky. No sign of the Sun or even Saturn. Which is a shame, ’cause the planet and those rings would be a spectacular sight from here.”
“Any signs of life?” Berkowitz asked, and Gaeta realized the man must have asked his question even before he himself had started talking.
“The life-forms here are microscopic, like bacteria or amoebas. They live in the ground at temperatures close to two hundred below zero. Just ahead of the rover’s front end, the ground seems to be covered by some black goo. Looks like tar or maybe oil that’s thickened by the cold. Seems to extend all the way out past the horizon.”
Habib’s voice broke in on the first channel. “We have a list of questions for you. With the communications lag, we decided to send a set of questions instead of sending one at a time. I’m sending the list to you via your data link. The questions are arranged in a logical sequence. They’re rather rough, but we’re working on refining them.”
“Okay,” Gaeta said, glancing at the communications panel built into the suit’s chest wall. The yellow INCOMING light was flickering furiously. He manually clicked off Berkowitz’s frequency. No time for PR fluff now, he said to himself. There’s work to be done.
Urbain sat slumped at his desk, his arm throbbing, his face sheened with perspiration. I should go back to the control center, he told himself. I am their leader, I should
be I charge.
But he didn’t have the strength to get out of his swivel chair. Habib is conducting the mission; this is his domain, Urbain thought. Let him handle it. I can monitor the control center from here. No need to show myself. No need to let them all see how much this means to me, how much pain I am suffering.
This is my entire life, he reflected. If they cannot bring Alpha back online my career, my entire life, is finished.
He licked his parched lips and wished it didn’t hurt so much.
Standing in the cramped bridge of the transfer craft, Pancho listened to the chatter between Gaeta and Habib.
“They’re gonna try to talk to the rover’s main computer,” she said to Wanamaker, who stood beside her slightly hunched over, his arms floating weightlessly in the semifetal crouch typical of zero g. Pancho realized she too was making a pretty good imitation of an ape-woman.
“Call coming in,” Wanamaker said, pointing to the comm panel.
Pancho clicked the incoming frequency. Holly’s face filled the panel’s small screen. She looked eager, excited.
“Panch,” Holly said without preamble, “how’d you like to go comet hunting?”
Before Pancho could reply, Holly went on, “We don’t need to mine the rings! We can get water from comets and sell it! I’ve been talking it over with Doug Stavenger at Selene and he thinks it’s a good idea. You could start an operation that’ll sell water all across the system, from Mercury to Saturn and back again!”
“Wait, hold on,” Pancho said. “Slow down and tell me what this’s all about.”
But Holly rattled right on, “Panch, you’ve been wondering what you want to do. This is it! Go out and find comets, maybe even out past Neptune. Alter their orbits so they fall into the Belt or the Earth/Moon region, wherever they’re needed. Mine ’em for their water. It’ll work! You can get rich and I can beat Eberly with this!”