Titan

by Stephen Baxter

  But, she thought, all these problems would soon be swept away, more rapidly and effectively than even Xavier Maclachlan, in his wildest dreams, could have planned.

  She felt she’d lived through an immense paradox. After that steel cavern, she could understand why people felt that science was a terrible thing. Maybe even an evil thing. But the fact was that one nuke, in the right place at the right time, could have deflected this incoming, the Chinese rock. There was the paradox. What do we do when the dinosaur-killer comes? Accept it as nevitable? Throw philosophy books at it?

  But in the end it was science and technology which had delivered the evil on their heads. The paradox deepened.

  She just hoped there would be people around to debate this tomorrow.

  According to the projections prepared by her staff, everything depended on the geometry of the impact.

  A hell of a lot of kinetic energy would be released down-wards, into the crust, and upwards, into the atmosphere, first is a vapor plume and then as an airblast. If there was an ocean strike there would he earthquakes: Richter eight or nine. A lot of dust and salt water would be injected into the middle atmosphere; nobody cared to guess what that would do to the weather. And they were going to get global oscillations of the atmosphere and ionosphere. Upper atmosphere heating, high intensity atmospheric disturbances. Hydrogen-mixing would wreck the ozone layer, for good and all. A lot of nitrogen would be burned, into nitrogen dioxide, nitric acid. Acid rain. And the high-speed plasma plumes from the shock, reaching up to the geomagnetic field, were going to play hell with the radiation belts…

  Funny weather. Storms. Auroras. Lousy communications. Stunning sunsets, from all that dust. The skies would be spectacular.

  Even if the impact itself wasn’t too severe, secondary effects could do a lot of damage. Nuclear waste repositories. Hydroelectric power stations and dams. Chemical plants. Nuclear power stations. She imagined a dozen Chernobyls, scattered along the eastern seaboard…

  Still, it was possible humanity—even civilization—could survive the impact itself and its consequences. But then, everything would depend on the war that would surely follow, when the Chinese came over in their clumsy ships, and Al Hartle and his boys emerged from their bunkers in Cheyenne, and they started the work of finishing off whatever the asteroid left behind.

  Even given enough survivors, she thought bleakly, it might be impossible to climb back. The post-impact world would not be a blank slate for a new civilization, now that they’d used up all the most accessible raw materials—ore, coal, oil. And besides the biosphere was already unstable. This might trigger the final plankton collapse, for instance…

  It seemed incredible, here in the morning sunshine, on a day like all the other days, stretching back to her first bright memories. But today could be the last day of all. Maybe, she thought, in a couple of centuries, all that will be left of us will be a few relics on the Moon, whatever Paula builds on Titan, a handful of aging space probes heading out of the System.

  She reached the Lincoln Memorial. She climbed the steps, and stared up at Lincoln’s impassive face.

  She sat on the step at the top of the Memorial. She was looking east, in the direction of the Atlantic. The sun was well above the horizon now, the sky a clear blue dome. Traffic was beginning to seep into the brightening streets, and its distant noise rose to an oceanic roar, suffusing the landscape.

  Sitting here, with the warmth of the sun on her face, the solidity of marble beneath her, she tried to comprehend that by the end of this nondescript day, all this—the labor of centuries—could be lost.

  She was hungry, she found.

  Benacerraf lay cocooned in her sleeping bag, on an improvised mattress of insulation material and space clothing.

  Every time she woke, she had two priorities: to keep warm, and not to open her mouth.

  There were several layers of hull metal and insulation—the base of the hab module and the orbiter’s cargo bay—lying between her and the hundred-and-eighty-below slush of Titan. Even so, the miles of ice below her sucked the heat out of her aging body during the night. She woke up in exactly the same position as when she’d fallen asleep, as if she’d trained herself not to move in her sleep, no matter how stiff she got. She’d found that if she lay still, on the patch of her sleeping bag that her body had warmed up, she could stay relatively comfortable. But if she moved, she would tip over onto a colder place, and the warm air she had gathered around herself would spill out, leaving her shivering.

  So she lay, hanging on to the last fragments of the night’s warmth, before she had to face the day.

  She opened her eyes slowly.

  Her reading light was turned off, but enough light leaked around the door to let her make out the lines of the little room: the aluminum mirror on the wall, the lashed-up shelf with her softscreen and her precious paper books, the toothbrush with the broken handle she’d had to tape together…

  The realization of where she was pushed its way into her consciousness with all its usual, unwelcome force, and she felt black dread welling inside her.

  She sat up. The sleeping bag fell away from her shoulders, and immediately she was shivering, despite the thick Beta-cloth clothing she wore as pajamas.

  Still in the dark, she got to her feet. The sleeping bag made a cloth puddle at her feet. She could see her face, dimly, in the scuffed aluminum mirror. She saw an old woman, her face lined and patched with shallow frostbite scars, her hair a dirty cloud, crudely cut, her mouth a bloody mess.

  She opened up her tube of lip salve. She smeared it over the lumpy scabs on her lips. Then she started to work the tip of her tongue gently against the lips, from the inside, until, slowly, they began to part, with little damage to the scabs that had welded together during the night.

  Her lips had got damaged during an EVA, when her helmet seal had sprung a leak. She knew she had been lucky; she’d been just a few feet from the airlock. The cold, crowding into her helmet, had been intense. Startled, she had almost fallen, and her lips and chin had come into contact with the cooling glass of her visor. She had pulled her face back, leaving chunks of ripped flesh behind, and a violent burning sensation around her mouth.

  She had clamped her eyes shut, and fumbled for Discovery’s airlock.

  She got through with no serious frostbite damage. But her lips were a mess. Now, every time she ate, she got a salty mouthful of blood; and every spoonful of soup she lifted to her mouth was streaked with crimson. A couple of times, just after the injury, she’d opened her mouth during the night, or on waking, and had torn the night’s new lip scabs right off.

  Cautiously, she stretched her mouth a little wider. The clustered scabs ached, and she could see how some of the deeper crevices had opened again, so that they glistened bright red.

  She thought ahead. She was due to spend most of today in the CELSS farm, cleaning out the nutrient pipes. And later she would have to find some time to work with Rosenberg on the details of the El Dorado EVA—

  The door behind her opened quietly.

  She turned, startled, and nearly fell; she banged her elbow against the shelf.

  There was a figure in the doorway, silhouetted against the brightness of the hab module floods.

  Anger welled up in her. This was her quarters, damn it, her one little island of privacy. “Rosenberg, I don’t care what the emergency is. Get out of here.”

  “No,” he said; and that single, gruff syllable told her everything she needed to know.

  It wasn’t Rosenberg. It was Bill Angel.

  And, she realized with sudden horror, today his long decline was going to reach some kind of conclusion.

  As the sun climbed and the mist burned off, the colors of Launch Complex 39 emerged more clearly. The snow-white of the toy Saturn was strongly contrasted with the batdeship gray of the gantry which enfolded it.

  After losing his NASA position to Al Hartle, Hadamard had entered semi-retirement. He couldn’t have gotten another position
in Maclachlan’s Administration anyhow, and nor would he have wanted it. He had received a large payoff—that had been written into his contract when he was recruited from industry—and so he was financially comfortable. He had kept on his house in Clear Lake, but he hadn’t spent much time in Houston.

  He had no living family, no particular ties. He wasn’t sure what he wanted to do with the rest of his life.

  To Hadamard, looking back, his years at NASA had represented a kind of slow crisis for him, like a long breakdown.

  He had gone into NASA to dismantle the Agency, much as he had dismantled and reassembled several corporations and Government departments before. By the time he emerged, he had spent years trying to defend it.

  He toured the country, visiting relics of the space program: the rusting tracking station at Goldstone, the mothballed Shuttle launch facilities at Vandenberg, the old Saturn construction and test facilities around the country, abandoned or converted by Boeing and Rockwell. He gained a sense of the impermanence of it all; it was as if some insane occupying power had swept across the country, developed these immense facilities at enormous cost, and then abandoned their foothold.

  Jake Hadamard, after years running NASA, still didn’t understand the meaning of the space program, nor even his own shitting reaction to it.

  Perhaps there was no single meaning, no single valid reaction; perhaps the event was simply too huge for that. But he’d come to suspect that it was only for space—human footprints on the Moon, and on a satellite of Saturn—that his nation would, in the longest of terms, be remembered.

  Or even, he thought, his species.

  When he’d heard leaked reports of the incoming rock, he’d decided there was only one place he wanted to be.

  … There was a spark of light, high in the sky.

  Hadamard shielded his eyes with his hands and looked up, searching for the source. It had been hot, yellow; liquid, like rocket light.

  It came in at an angle, far to the east, a blindingly white line scrawled across the sky. It was a crack in the Aristotelian dome, Fahy thought, allowing in the monsters.

  Asteroid 2002OA had arrived.

  She had to turn away, it was so bright.

  It was going to he an ocean strike, then. Just as NORAD predicted. A few hundred miles off the coast, she guessed.

  The dazzling light had faded now.

  So it was true. She thought she’d imagined, with some soft unscientific part of her, until this moment, that it might be just some fantastic hypothesis.

  Well, Earth hadn’t suffered a strike like this for millions of years. Human written culture went back maybe five thousand years. There was no institutional memory of such an event as this. No wonder it was hard to comprehend, even to plan for. It should be.

  Clouds were boiling, scudding across the sky. The spectacle was playing out in an eerie silence. Even the traffic noises seemed to have stilled.

  The atmosphere would have provided no effective shield against the strike; the asteroid must have reached the ocean with no significant loss of mass or velocity: a mountainous mass of rock, moving at orbital speeds, through the delicate atmosphere of Earth. There was essentially an immense cylindrical explosion going on right now, its effects scouring outward over the surface of the planet.

  From orbit, she thought, it would be a hell of a sight: the crater still visible, a glowing red puncture miles across, keeping the sea at bay with its raw heat; an immense column of dust and pulverized rock and vapor rising up above it, its lip extending tens of miles into the atmosphere; the clouds bubbling outward in ranks, like the concentric rings around a bull’s eye target.

  A breeze, warm and heavy, pushed against her face, pressing from the east. There were flecks of moisture on the wind. She licked her lips. Salt: ocean water, scooped up and hurled across hundreds of miles.

  Maybe there would be tsunamis. But the geometry was dicey; it depended precisely where the impact was, the topography of the ocean bed. Gradual slopes could reflect the wave energy back to the Atlantic…

  There was noise now, at last, a deep bass rumble like remote thunder. The light continued to fade.

  The ground shifted, the solid marble of the Memorial’s vast plinth shuddering like a live thing.

  For the first time, she was scared. The ground wasn’t supposed to move under you, damn it. It was as if some deep superstitious part of her had woken, an animal peering up at a violent sky in terror.

  With her back against the wall of her quarters—the little room wasn’t much bigger than a closet—Benacerraf held up her hands, palms out. “What is it, Bill? What do you need? Are you hungry?”

  With sudden, brutal force, he pushed his way into the quarters. She squirmed back against the wall, but his chest and legs pressed against hers, and she could smell the milky sweetness of his breath.

  She felt shocked, violated, her last secret place broken open.

  He dragged the door shut behind him, and she was immersed in the near-dark once more. She tried not to scream. But her mouth twisted open, and the pain in her lips stabbed at her awareness. She turned her head and pulled her hands back from him, so reluctant was she to touch him.

  Again he was still, a huge presence resting against her. He seemed to move in bursts between moments of stillness; it was like the motion of a lizard, rather than anything human.

  With an effort she moved her hands forward, in the darkness, until she touched his shoulders. She could feel his chest rise and fall with his breath, raggedly. “Bill, you know you shouldn’t be in here. This is my room. We all need privacy—”

  “I’m not a lucking kid.” He reached up and closed his hands over hers. His fingers were powerful, stronger than she would have imagined, and he bent her fingers back, making her cry out. “I’m sick of you talking down at me, Paula.” Now he pushed her hands against her chest so that she was shoved back, painfully, against her shelf.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “I want respect,” he said. “You can understand that, can’t you?” He brought his face closer to hers. “Some things I can still do, eyes or no eyes.”

  “Of course you can, Bill. I always—”

  He pushed his head forward. He shoved his lips against hers. The muscles of his face were strong, and he easily forced her lips open, and jammed his tongue into her mouth. His lips worked at hers, his teeth scraping hard over the wounds there. Her scabs broke and came loose, the crevice-like wounds opening. She could taste her own blood, the salty tang of saliva and sweat and snot.

  The pain in her mouth forced her to cry out again.

  He jerked his head back, as if startled, his movements precise and inhuman.

  “You’re hurting me, damn it.” Her voice was slurred as she favored her damaged lips. She longed to wipe her mouth, to spit out his dirt.

  He began to drag his right hand down over her body, still trapping her fist. His fingers clawed at her breast, through layers of Beta-cloth.

  “Bill, for God’s sake.”

  “Come on,” he said, his voice a harsh whisper. “Haven’t you heard the news? Don’t you know what’s about to hit Earth?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “It’s the end of the fucking world, Paula. There’s just us now, alone here, a billion miles from home. It’s a new world. Adam and Eve.”

  You’re crazy, she thought. But if she said it, she sensed, it would make it so, now and forever.

  Behind Angel, the door to her quarters was swinging open; the glare of the hah module floods washed over her, outlining his face.

  He forced her hand down to his crotch. She tried to keep her fist curled, but he squeezed and shook her hand until she was forced to open her fingers, and he clamped her open hand against himself. She could feel his erection, a hot cylinder pushing against the coarse Beta-cloth.

  “Oh, God,” she said. “No, Bill. Not that.”

  “Come on. We can do this. Adam and Eve.”

  In Seattle, Jackie Benacerr
af was woken by a sound of thunder, miles away.

  She lay there for a moment, thinking about her mother’s descriptions of storms seen from orbit: Over central Africa, I could see lightning sparking constantly, over cloud systems spanning thousands of miles. The lightning moves through the clouds like a living thing, growing and spreading. Its glow shines from beneath the layer of cloud, and you can see a three-dimensional structure within the cloud, edges and swirls of purple…

  Her mother was a long way away.

  She sat up, alone in bed.

  The lights didn’t come on.

  She got out of bed. In pitch darkness, she felt her way to the softscreen coating one wall. Maybe she could get a look at the weather channels, find some kind of satellite view…

  The softscreen didn’t work. She pressed at its surface, but it remained inert, a window into darkness.

  She started to feel scared.

  She went out into the hall. No lights turned themselves on there, either. There were flashes of lightning now, big gaudy bursts that turned the windows into illuminated panels—but no accompanying peals of thunder, just that continual rumble.

  There was a smash outside, a clatter of breaking glass.

  She ran to the door, opened it. The night was warm; from somewhere, from the east, a hot wind had sprung up, and it pulled at her nightdress and hair. Above, clouds streamed, thick and gaudy; she could see lightning crackle beyond the lowest clouds, in big gaudy sheets, flaring parallel to the ground.

  The streetlights were out, she realized; the only light came from the intermittent bursts of lightning, a purplish glow from the streaming clouds.

  Even the orange glow of Seattle was invisible.

  In her bare feet, she walked down the drive towards the security barrier.

  On the corner, two cars had run into each other; their fronts had crumpled, head-on, and steam was rising from a cracked radiator. The drivers had got out, and were slowly walking around the wreckage. The headlamps of the cars cast a pool of light in the middle of the darkness.