Titan

by Stephen Baxter

  Benacerraf reached behind to rub the muscles at the back of her neck. “There is no ‘them.’ Or I’m part of ‘them.’ I’m a senior official in the national space program. I have to try to make things happen. Besides, what doesn’t seem to occur to you is that maybe this work makes me happy.”

  “If that’s so, why are you so prickly?”

  “I’m not prickly, damn it—” Benacerraf subsided, and Jackie grinned at her.

  It was a familiar argument to Benacerraf. What is it with you young people? What in hell happened to the work ethic? Don’t you take anything seriously? …

  It was a long time since Jackie had tried to push ahead with her journalism. At times Benacerraf felt she couldn’t stand to see Jackie drift through her life like this, like so many of her age group, floating from one career option to another, passing through relationships that coalesced briefly—sometimes leaving behind kids, as had Jackie’s brief marriage—and on to the next vague destination.

  It wasn’t the structure of Jackie’s life that bugged her, but her casualness, her lack of seriousness. There seemed no need to struggle, to take responsibility—no attempt to build things.

  She suppressed the impulse to snap. Now, of all times, wasn’t the moment to pick a fight with her daughter.

  Anyhow, she thought, maybe Jackie and her generation are right. Look at me, slaving here in the small hours, over this huge Titan boondoggle. Maybe my day is done. Maybe this project is the last spasm of whatever drove us, in the last century, to our great, ambitious endeavors. Perhaps when this is over—when my generation has gone, the last great rocket ships fired off—the world will sink back, lapse into a kind of high-tech pastoralism.

  Jackie got up and walked to Benacerraf’s back, and took over rubbing her neck muscles for her.

  “That feels good,” Benacerraf said.

  “Just like when I was a little girl, huh?”

  “Even then you always had good hands.”

  “All that tennis I played.”

  “You could have been a surgeon. A physiotherapist—”

  Jackie laughed. “A carpenter, like Jesus. Come on, Mom; you’re sounding like a cliché again.”

  “Sorry.”

  Jackie pointed to the softscreen, which Benacerraf had folded over. “You going to tell me what you’re working on?”

  I’m not supposed to, Benacerraf thought. But you deserve to know.

  “Here.” She unfolded the softscreen and smoothed out its creases.

  Jackie sat down again, pulled the softscreen to her, and ran her finger over its smooth fabric surface, a reading habit she’d developed as a child.

  … The purpose of this memorandum is to obtain your approval to use Space Shuttle and ancillary technology to fly an open-ended manned mission to Saturn’s moon, Titan, in the short-term timeframe, with a resupply and retrieval strategy in the medium-term based on new-generation Reusable Launch Vehicle technology.

  My recommendation is based on an exhaustive renew of pertinent technical and operational factors and also careful consideration of the impact that either a success or a failure in this mission will have on the future of the Agency.

  My objective has been to bring into meaningful perspective the trade-offs between total program risk and gain. As you know, this assessment process is inherently judgmental in nature. Many factors have been considered during a comprehensive series of reviews, conducted over the past several months, to examine in detail all facets of the considerations involved in planning for and providing a capability to fly a crew of five or six on a Titan landing mission. A key benefit for the Agency is the motivation such a mission provides for maintaining funding and commitment for the upcoming RLV program.

  In conclusion, but with the proviso that all open work against the open-ended Titan mission is completed and certified, I request your approval to proceed with the implementation plan required to support an early launch readiness date.

  Turning to details of the—

  Jackie pushed the softscreen back across the table to her mother. “You can’t be serious,” she said.

  Benacerraf sipped her apple juice. “Never more so.”

  “Is this to do with all that JPL shit? My God, the arrogance. You can’t even fly to orbit and back without crashing all over the place. How do you imagine you can send people to Saturn?”

  Benacerraf shrugged. “Do you really care? You’ll learn all about it when it gets made public, if you’re interested.” As, she thought sourly, you probably won’t be.

  But Jackie was staring at her. “Oh. Hold up. Hold it right there. I think I’m just starting to figure this out.”

  “Jackie, I—”

  “You want to go. Don’t you? To Titan, on this ridiculous oneway jaunt.” She slammed the table. “Mother, you are not going to Saturn.”

  Benacerraf was taken aback by her anger. “Jackie—”

  “Don’t you know what it’s like for me, when you fly in space, in that ludicrous old technology? Every moment you were off the ground in Columbia, I could think of nothing but the danger. And when Columbia went through the crash, I was convinced I wouldn’t see you again. Right now the kids are too young to understand, but soon… And now you talk about this, about leaving the Earth altogether?”

  “It isn’t like that. There’s a retrieval strategy, based on—”

  “You don’t understand, do you?” Jackie’s eyes were dry, her expression hard. “Listen to me. Flying into space is meaningless. It always was. The technology is antiquated and unsafe, and there’s nowhere to go, and all your language of risk reduction is just a play with words. And for what? The whole thing is just a selfish stunt.”

  Benacerraf felt her own anger building in response. “I won’t be called selfish by you. I’m more than just your mother, damn it. I’ve raised you, as best I could. And now you’re grown, my life is my own—”

  Jackie snapped, “Why don’t you put that in your report?” She walked out of the kitchen.

  Benacerraf sat for long minutes.

  Then she pulled the softscreen towards her.

  Hadamard hauled on the thermal meteoroid garment. It was a heavy, floppy, deflated balloon made of tough white Betacloth. There were sockets over the front, where he plugged in his backpack umbilicals for oxygen, water and telecommunications.

  Alongside him, Buzz Aldrin—thirty-nine years old, bald as a coot, and eager as a virgin—was climbing into his own suit.

  The Moon suit, authentically rendered, was unbelievably primitive, Hadamard reflected. To think you actually had to assemble it, here on the lunar surface. It was incredible none of the Moonwalkers had been killed, betrayed by leaky plumbing.

  When his suit was closed Hadamard flicked a switch, and the pumps and fans in his backpack started. He heard the hum of machinery, and oxygen whooshed across his face.

  The veracity of the experience was extraordinary, right down to the sensation of increasing pressure in his ears.

  He gave Aldrin a thumbs-up, and through his shining bubble helmet, Aldrin grinned back at him.

  The first line in the script was Hadamard’s.

  “Houston, this is Tranquillity. We’re standing by for a go for cabin depress, over.”

  Tranquillity Base, this is Houston. You are go for cabin depressurize, over.

  Aldrin opened the valve that would vent Eagle’s oxygen to space. The pressure crept downward, much more slowly than Hadamard had expected, despite his detailed knowledge of the timeline. It took all of three minutes to get down to four-tenths of a pound.

  “Everything is go here,” Hadamard said. “We’re just waiting for the cabin pressure to bleed, to blow enough pressure to open the hatch…” Hadamard could hear a stiffness in his own tone, as he pronounced the scripted words.

  The events of the Moonwalk—at any rate the few minutes surrounding the first footstep itself—had become utterly familiar, through a thousand reproductions and adaptations and digitizations and dramatizations; it was thought
that a copy of this script resided in every home with online access, which meant most of mainland U.S. The rest of Apollo—the later flights, even the rest of the Apollo 11 mission—had been largely forgotten now. But, Hadamard thought, the story of these few minutes of the first footstep was probably as familiar, in the public mind, as the story of the Nativity.

  It was one hell of a legacy to manage.

  “Let me see if it will open now,” Aldrin said. Clumsily, he reached down for the hatch handle. He tugged on the thin metal door, hut it stayed firmly shut. Aldrin pulled vigorously, and Hadamard feared he might rip the thin metal shell of the Lunar Module. Finally Aldrin peeled back one corner of the door to break the seal.

  The next part of the litany was Hadatnard’s. “The hatch is coming open,” he said, and he heard, spontaneously, excitement creep into his voice.

  As if it were all real.

  A flurry of ice particles gushed out into the lunar vacuum beyond the hatch, the last of the LM’s atmosphere.

  Aldrin held the hatch open, and Hadamard sank to his knees and carefully moved his suited bulk backward through the opening. It was awkward, confining, more like struggling to escape from the neck of a sack than leaving an aircraft.

  The Aldrin simulation gave him running guidance. “Jake, you’re lined up nicely. Towards me a little bit. Okay, down. Roll to the left. Put your left foot to the right a little bit. You’re doing fine…”

  Hadamard crawled out onto a large platform called the porch, which bridged the gap between the hatch and the ladder to the surface. He groped backward with his boots, and found the top rung. He got hold of the porch’s handrails and raised himself upright, cautiously.

  “Okay, Houston, I’m on the porch.”

  Before him was the blocky, shadowed bulk of the LM. Beyond that, reaching all the way to the close horizon, was a pocked, rock-strewn, tan brown surface. There were craters everywhere, of all sizes, right down to the little micrometeorite pits on the sides of the rocks that the astronauts had called zap pits. On some of the rocks he saw an exotic sparkle, like a glaze. The colors, though, depended on which way he looked, on the angle to the sun, as if he was looking through a polarizing filter.

  He knew this representation had been beefed up from the original photographs with fractal technology. Those zap pits weren’t real, for instance. But it looked pretty convincing to Hadamard. He could well believe this place had been gardened, pulverized by meteorite strikes, for billions of years.

  The land, he saw, actually curved, gently but noticeably, all the way to the horizon, and in every direction from him. He was standing on a rocky sphere, no more and no less. This was a small world indeed. The sky was utterly dark, save for the blue Earth, which was almost directly overhead, visible only if he tilted back his head…

  “What do you think of it?”

  He turned. An astronaut had come bounding around the far side of the LM, her suit glowing white.

  “Paula?”

  “Hi, Jake.”

  He felt an odd reluctance to come out of the illusion. “Disney-Coke has done a good job.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Maybe this was what it was all about in the first place, do you think? Circus stunts, entertainment? And maybe in a few more years these visitors’ centers will be all that’s left…”

  “Oh, how symbolic. And that’s why you’ve dragged me here today, Paula. Correct?”

  “Did you read my recommendation?”

  “Not past the management summary. No.”

  “Then,” she said coolly, “you’re going to have to. Like it or not that recommendation is the result of eighteen months’ study, and it comes with a lot of management weight behind it.”

  “Paula, I just couldn’t believe what I read. I don’t see how I’m going to be able to justify the costs, even of defining the proposal fully. It’s ridiculous. You’re talking about a manned mission to Saturn, for God’s sake. Who’s going to take that seriously?”

  “There are costs associated with everything we do,” she said. “Just mothballing the orbiters is going to cost. Probably we’ll even make a loss out of scrapping the launch complexes, turning the VAB into a jungle gym… Jake, this is your job. But I know you’ve retained unexpended funding from the shutdown manned space program, from the last couple of fiscal years. Funding that’s still at your discretion; funding above and beyond what you disclosed to me when I took on this job.”

  “You’re aware of that, huh.”

  “It’s not so hard to trace. We can cover this financially. It’s just a question of whether you want to do this, or not. Whether you’ll back it… You’re getting behind your timeline.”

  “Oh, yeah.” A prompter scrolled discreetly across the base of his visor, with his next few lines. The next part of the sequence was to pull a D-ring on the side of the Eagle. “I’m going to pull the camera out now.” An equipment storage tray lowered on its hinges, bearing a small TV camera. “Houston, the MESA came down all right.”

  Hadamard could hear the capcom, Bruce McCandless, exclaim: Houston, roger, we copy and we’re standing by for your TV. Man, we’re getting a picture on the TV!

  “That’s a little gruff,” Benacerraf observed. “McCandless was just a rookie astronaut in 1969. That sounded a lot older.”

  “Disney-Coke brought the real McCandless out of retirement, and got him to overdub his contributions. So I guess you have a clash of authenticity measures,” Hadamard said drily. “Of course, McCandless went on to fly Shuttle. He was actually more expensive to get than Buzz Aldrin.”

  There’s a great deal of contrast in it and currently it’s upside down on our monitor, but we can make out a fair amount of detail… Okay, Jake, we can see you coming down the ladder now.

  Hadamard began to descend the ladder, one rung at a time. His primitive suit, inflated like a big white balloon around him, was so stiff he had trouble bending his legs, and he found he had to just let go and drop from rung to rung.

  When he got to the bottom rung he was still more than three feet off the ground. He could see the big dish of the foilcovered footpad beneath him. He dangled one foot, trying to build up the courage to take this final step. Then he pushed himself away from the ladder, gently.

  He went into a slow-motion fall. It took maybe a second to drop to the footpad, but on Earth it would have taken less than halt that. The difference was pleasingly noticeable. He couldn’t feel the invisible harness supporting him at all.

  He was in deep shadow here.

  “I’ve also been receiving more proposals from the USAF for disposing of the Shuttle fleet,” he said to Benacerraf.

  “Proposals that went straight to you, over my head,” she said mildly.

  “I guess so. Well, that’s the way it works, Paula. Those guys play for keeps.”

  “The USAF proposals are entirely destructive.”

  “I don’t think that’s entirely fair,” he said. The USAF had given up on their grandiose L5 schemes. Now they proposed to use the remaining orbiters as unmanned testbeds, on suborbital flights inside and outside the atmosphere, probing hypersonic, high-altitude flight regimes which were still only partially understood. “We could get some good data out of there.”

  “For what purpose? The data, such as it would be, would sit locked away in big USAF databases. And for that dubious benefit they would destroy the orbiters, a national treasure.”

  But it would get Al Hartle off my back, he thought. “Give me a single good reason why I should recommend we go to Titan,” he said.

  “Because it represents the true high ground,” she replied immediately. She turned, and started to Moonwalk; she drifted across the glowing lunar ground, dreamlike.

  “That’s a worn old phrase.”

  “But in this case, I think it applies,” she said. “Titan is the key to the rest of the Solar System. You’ve seen Rosenberg’s detailed plan—”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s almost like a business plan,” she said. “On the s
urface it seems fantastic. But in fact it’s orderly, logical.”

  “It’s a dream,” he said. “You’re talking to an accountant, remember. It’s not a business plan at all.”

  “Jake, we’re overdue for a breakthrough in booster technology. That’s been obvious for a couple of decades. The Shuttle system uses technology that goes back to Goddard in the 1920s. The Shuttle is just a V-2 with air conditioning. Somebody’s going to make the breakthrough, sooner or later, to routine, cheap access to space. And once that happens, there will be an explosion off-world. You’ll see factories, farms, power stations in LEO … and the next words spoken on the surface of the Moon will be Chinese. Or Korean, or Vietnamese. Soon after that, those guys will make it to Mars, the asteroids. We aren’t investing in the right stuff, the core technologies. Any Americans who want to go will have to book passage.

  “We’re about to lose out on an historic opportunity, Jake. We’ve already lost the inner Solar System. Despite the panic, the rush to invest in space since the crash, I don’t see any way to avoid that. We’ve spent too long looking inward, retrenching, cutting back, to change now.”

  Actually he agreed. Decadent, he thought. That’s what we are now. We deserve to be overtaken, by younger, more vigorous economies.

  She said, “But, right at this moment, we have the ability to get to Titan. And if we do that, we’ll have control of a world of resources that are scarce in the rest of the System. Do you get it, Jake? We’ll have just that one little island in the sky, but it will represent the high ground. As a nation we will still be in the game, in the medium and far future.”

  He grunted, unimpressed. “Is that all you have? This visionary crap?”

  “No. I have a lot more visionary crap.”

  “Such as?”

  “Jake, here you are on the surface of the Moon. Or as near as damn it. I’ve brought you here for a reason.”

  He laughed. “To sway me with flashy Disney-Coke virtuals.”

  “No. Well, maybe. Look, Jake, there are whole generations out there much too young to remember Apollo. It we don’t give them this, they’ll be left with nothing more than the memory of a Shuttle crash. We’ll deserve to sink back into all the anti-rational garbage that’s threatening to drown us. But if we act, now… You could be a hero, Jake.”