Titan

by Stephen Baxter

  She looked around. As far as she could see, there wasn’t a single softscreen working: street signs, house decorations, ad hoardings—all of it was dead, inert, black. It was bizarre, to be without the endless unraveling of colors and shapes all around her: there was an optical stillness she hadn’t experienced in the city for years.

  Something, she thought, is very wrong.

  And yet, somehow, in some hidden chamber of her heart, she had always known it would come to this.

  The boys, she thought. They are the main priority now. Thank God they are both home. Perhaps she should go and wake them.

  … But what if the shit really was hitting the fan? How could they prepare? Perhaps they ought to go to the store. Buy canned and packet food, long-life milk. A butane stove. Blankets, torches, thick coats, an axe. Gas for the car.

  A gun.

  Somewhere, a siren started a mournful wailing. It seemed to puncture her.

  They finally did it, she thought. Her plans broke up in her head, and she cried out.

  It was over, she realized, with a deep, unwelcome stab of comprehension. The last vestige of control she could exert over her life was gone. She wouldn’t even be able to save her children.

  Rain began to fall: heavy, scummy droplets of it, breaking open on the sidewalk. She lifted her face into it; the rain was salty, and stung her eyes. She wondered where Saturn was, in the hidden sky.

  Was it worth it, Mother? Was it worth all this, blowing everything apart, just so you could get to walk in the slush up there?

  The rain fell harder, soaking her. She hurried up the path to her children.

  Dark, thick storm clouds streamed over the sky above Fahy, obscuring the sun. Rain started to fall, big droplets, pelting against the marble surfaces, her clothes and hair, heavy and warm and salty.

  She permitted herself a fragment of hope. After all she wasn’t dead yet. The strike itself was over. The world was going to be a piece of shit after this, war or not; but maybe, just maybe, she might live through this to see it.

  Maybe NORAD and the rest had miscalculated, she thought. Maybe 2002OA just wasn’t a big enough punch to—

  But there was something on the horizon, now: a gray wall, perhaps a bank of cloud.

  Oh.

  The secondary effects need not concern her any more, she thought.

  The wall was water, a bank of it that had to be a mile high. Already it was marching inland. Even from this distance she could see debris embedded in its curving, steel-gray flank: rocks, fragments of ships, pieces of smashed-up buildings. It was the debris that would do the damage, she knew; with its help that wave could scour the ground clean of any sign this capital city had ever existed.

  We don’t deserve this, she thought. Although maybe it looks different if you sit in Beijing. And there are those who say something like this, some terrible conclusion, was inevitable, that the huge technological project we’ve been following was bound to end in grief and destruction.

  But I know we don’t deserve to have this done to us. Sure, we got things wrong. And we’re guilty of being the only nation in history to have dropped an atomic weapon on an opponent. But didn’t we beat back the Nazis and the Japs? Wasn’t it a good thing that we won the Cold War, and not the other side? Was it really such a terrible thing, to aspire to walk on the moons of Saturn?…

  I will, she thought, never see the sun again.

  She felt a wrench, a deep sorrow.

  The clouds thickened, and moist air buffeted her face, driven ahead of that horizon-spanning piston of water.

  He looked oddly beautiful, she thought with a rogue part of her mind: his face blank and intent, ruined eyes closed, that WASP hair shining in the hab module floods. And he was so strong.

  He pulled at the neck of her T-shirt, trying to rip it. The coarse hem burned into her neck. The tough fabric wouldn’t rip, so he pushed his hand up inside her clothing instead. He reached her breast and grabbed it, squeezing hard. Then he shoved his hand downward over her belly, trying to get into her pants.

  He pushed his face forward and began to gnaw at her lips once more.

  Her left hand was free.

  She grabbed the door frame and yanked backwards, as hard as she could.

  On Earth, perhaps she couldn’t have budged Angel. But here they were in one-seventh gravity. Locked together, they began to tip over.

  Angel released the hand he’d held over his penis, and reached behind to brace his fall. She tried to keep from falling with him; she grabbed at the doorway. But his other hand was stuck inside her clothing; he dragged her down on top of him, helpless.

  He landed heavily on his arm, and there was a snap, like the breaking of a thin branch. Angel screamed. He scrabbled against the floor, like a turned-over beetle, his ruined eyes turning back and forth.

  She rolled away from him. It was the first moment since he’d burst into her quarters that she hadn’t been in physical contact with him. He was stirring. Clutching his damaged arm against his chest, he was turning over, getting to his knees.

  She tried to stand up, but she felt weak and off-balance. She crawled away, towards the galley.

  He reached out and grabbed her ankle. The effort cost him the support of his good arm, and she could see him tall flat on his chest. But even so he was able to drag her back towards him.

  She was rolled onto her back. For a moment she lay with her feet mere inches from his face. With one slam of her heel in his face, she thought, this could be over. She lifted up her free foot, trying to make herself do it.

  Angel flopped towards her, so that his mass trapped her legs, his bad arm pinned between them. He didn’t seem to notice the pain now. With his good hand he reached up and grabbed at the waist of her pants, trying to haul them off her.

  Suddenly, Rosenberg stood over them. He held one of their improvised snow shovels, with its sharp blade of Apollo hull section. Holding the handle with two hands, he raised the blade over his head.

  His bespectacled face was blank, thoughtful, as if he was considering some abstract problem.

  “Rosenberg! Don’t … we have to…”

  He brought the blade swinging down through the air, as if he was chopping wood. The blade hit Angel’s neck, with a moist, soft noise, like slicing cabbage.

  Blood splashed. Angel stiffened, throwing his head back.

  Then he slumped forward against her, his hand still locked in her waist band. The blade seemed to be stuck in his neck.

  Rosenberg bent and grabbed Angel’s long hair. He hauled, and just peeled Angel away from her. She saw blood—her blood?—dribbling from Angel’s mouth.

  Rosenberg dumped Angel aside. The blade came free of Angel’s neck now, and tumbled to the floor with a clatter.

  Benacerraf sat up. The neck of her T-shirt was stretched, but not torn. There was a smear over the front, of blood and saliva and snot. Angel had managed to pull her shorts down as far as her hips, and her bony pelvis was exposed, a dark rim of pubic hair. She tugged at a flap of cloth, covering her crotch.

  “He’s dead,” Rosenberg said evenly.

  “I think he broke his arm, when I fell on him.”

  Rosenberg shrugged. “Brittle bones. He had the skeleton of an old man. To hell with him.”

  “Are you all right, Rosenberg?”

  He studied her, as if examining a specimen of gumbo. “I don’t know. I’ve come a long way from JPL.”

  “Yeah.”

  She shuddered, and pulled her arms around her torso.

  Hadamard was on his belly, on the ground. Immense chunks of debris, rusted and torn, clattered down around him.

  An earthquake, in Florida.

  His arms were splayed out, over the ground. His face was pressed into the sweet grass. The grass, he noticed, was a rich green, and still moist from the dew of the morning, and where his cheeks and chin had crushed the blades, there was a warm chlorophyll smell.

  There was blood on the grass, though, a deep crimson, and a sharp stab of
pain in his mouth. He probed gingerly with his tongue. The front of his mouth was a mess; it felt as if his lower teeth had been smashed, and his lip felt ripped open, as if his teeth had jammed themselves through the flesh.

  He had difficulty moving his jaw. Perhaps it was broken.

  Now he pulled his hands towards him, and he felt the moist grass rustling beneath his palms. With his hands beneath his shoulders, he pushed, as if attempting a press-up.

  He couldn’t lift his chest off the ground. And when he tried, a pain in his legs and knees, extraordinary in its intensity, came flooding over him.

  He slumped back to the ground. As he did so, he felt something grind inside his chest, a new source of astounding pain.

  Probably he was trapped under debris from the press stand. Maybe his legs were broken too. And it felt as it there was a busted rib or two in there…

  His orderly catalogue broke down, as his thinking was overwhelmed by a new wave of agony.

  He was thirsty.

  He managed to turn his head to look across at the VAB. The big cube of a building had cracked, from the lip of one of the huge Saturn-V-size doorways all the way to the root. Gigantic blocks and sheets of concrete were falling away from the walls of the building, exposing fresh, unweathered material beneath, which gleamed briefly in what was left of the sunlight; for a moment Hadamard had a brief vision of how this magnificent folly must have looked in the 1960s, when it was fresh and new and unweathered, the embodiment of a gigantic technocratic dream.

  But then the cracks widened, and the interior of the structure, its skeletal framework within, was exposed.

  At the foot of the crumbling building he saw a splash of red metal, splayed out beneath a fifty-foot slab of concrete. It was his car, crushed like a bug.

  He twisted his neck and looked across the Banana River.

  It looked as if 39-B had gone altogether. 39-A was tilted at a crazy angle. Next to that defiant, rusting skeleton, the Saturn mockup had been snapped in two. The first stage was still standing, like a stump of broken bone, but the upper stages and the fake Apollo spacecraft lay, indistinctly visible, scattered on the ground at the foot of the gantry.

  No more Moon flights for a while, he thought.

  At least the Moon rocks ought to be safe, those unopened samples in their vaults in JSC. Maybe archaeologists of the future would find that huge, twenty-billion-dollar cache, the unopened cores and sealed boxes, and wonder how so much of this alien rock had found its way to the planet Earth.

  The water in the Banana River was draining, as if a plug had been drawn.

  The shocks returned.

  The overgrown meadow in front of him lifted up. He could actually see the pressure wave traversing the surface of the ground, as if the Earth itself had been shocked into some new fluid form.

  There was an immense groan, a rumble deeper than the roar of any rocket engine.

  And then the ground lifted up beneath him. He was thrown into the air, his limbs dangling like a doll’s. The pain in his legs was excruciating.

  But the experience was oddly exhilarating, as if he were a child, thrown up by his father, with safe, strong arms waiting to catch him.

  He caught a last, wheeling glimpse of Florida sunlight.

  She showered, scrubbing herself in as much hot water as Discovery could feed her. She was bruised, on her breast and her stomach, where Angel had grabbed at her. Her neck was burned from the Beta-cloth. Her lips were a mess, and she knew she would have to ask Rosenberg to treat them.

  But not today. She couldn’t stand the thought of being touched again. Not today.

  When she was done she dumped her soiled clothes outside her quarters. She got back in and closed the door. She straightened out her sleeping bag, which had been kicked around during the struggle.

  She got inside, and wrapped her arms around herself, trying to stop shivering, unable to sleep.

  Outside she could hear Rosenberg moving around the hab module, hauling at heavy loads.

  When she got too thirsty, she dressed, and pushed her way out of her quarters.

  Her little pile of clothes had gone. And so had Angel’s body. The place looked clean, as if nothing had happened.

  She went to the galley and dug out the coffee. There were only a few ounces of freeze-dried grains left, and they were hoarding them for rainy days. But, she thought, her days weren’t going to come much rainier than this.

  She drank the coffee, thick and black. The hot liquid burned at her broken lips, but the pain was somehow welcome, cleansing. The Titan water in the tanks was as fresh as run-off from a Colorado mountain.

  Rosenberg came in from the airlock.

  “I saved you some coffee,” she said.

  His smile was thin. “Thanks.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Buried in the gumbo. But he ain’t going to stay there.”

  “You’re going to feed him to the water oxidizer.”

  “Damn right. Now he’s frozen out there, he will be easier to uh, dismantle. I’m no wet butcher, Paula.”

  “My God,” she said. “Sometimes I think you’re as crazy as he is.”

  “Was.”

  “Won’t it give you any qualms, to feed off life support loops containing the corpse of a human?”

  “Why should it? We’ve been eating each other’s waste products for two billion miles anyhow. Look, if it bothers you, I’ll just pass him through the SCWO and vent the products, discard the residue.”

  “The main thing is to get him burned, right?”

  “Do you object?”

  She pictured Bill Angel coming at her, and shuddered. “It was my fault,” she said slowly. “I handled him wrong, from the beginning.”

  “What the hell could you have done?”

  “He seemed so competent,” she said.

  “This helps us out with our life support equations. But the logic of our situation hasn’t changed, Paula. In fact—”

  “What?”

  “We had news from home.” He looked at her, searching her face. “They raised the stakes on us again, Paula. It’s even more important we survive.”

  She felt chill. Bill had said something… She’d thought he was raving. “What do you mean?”

  He smiled. “I ought to fix up that lip of yours,” he said.

  “Later, Rosenberg.”

  “Sure… You know, there’s always work to be done in the farm.”

  The farm. That was what she was supposed to be doing today.

  The thought of entering the tight walls of the old Apollo, with the racks of green, growing things under their sunlight lamps, was suddenly powerfully appealing to her.

  “Yes,” she said. “The farm.” She sipped the coffee from Earth, trying to make it last.

  Rosenberg went to the comms panel, and tried to find a signal from Houston.

  Book Five

  EXTRAVEHICULAR

  ACTIVITY

  A.D. 2015–A.D. 2016

  In 1990 its controllers had had Voyager One look back and take one last picture sequence before shutting down its camera.

  Voyager swiveled its instrument platform and shot a panoramic view of sixty images, encompassing in a single sweep every planet from Neptune, past Jupiter, past Earth, in to the sun. It was already so far from home that it took more than five hours for each pixel, traveling at the speed of light, to reach Earth.

  The sun was still striking, a brilliant point object millions of times brighter than the brightest star. But the planets, even the gas giants, were mere points of light.

  Even so, had Voyager repeated the experiment now, it would have been able to observe the changes that swept over Earth, in the year 2015.

  As the clouds rolled across the face of Earth’s oceans, the planet became a brilliant point source of reflected sunlight, its color lightening from blue to white, a twin of scorched Venus.

  Patiently, conserving its attitude fuel, the blocky spacecraft sailed further from the sun, pointing its anten
na home, obeying its iterated software instructions, calling steadily to Earth.

  As Titan’s long night drew to a close, Benacerraf and Rosenberg prepared for their expedition to El Dorado, the crater on Cronos, in search of kerogen.

  Working in the scuffed-up gumbo around the orbiter, they prepared to load their sleds. The sleds—six feet long, two wide—were improvised from Command Module hull sections, and had a covering of parachute canvas. Right now the sleds were configured to slide across gumbo; later, on Cronos, Rosenberg expected them to face a surface of raw ice, so they were carrying runners made from steel struts.

  The equipment pile was dauntingly high.

  Benacerraf bent and started to haul gear up onto her sled, the heaviest stuff at the bottom. The bulky items responded oddly in the low gravity; she had to haul to get them moving, but then inertia took over and she had to guide them, rather than lower them, into the right place on her sled. She checked each item off on the ring-bound checklist she had strapped to her wrist.

  The first item was the S-band radio they would use to navigate, triangulating off Cassini. Next came a light, high-density power cell, cannibalized from the skimmer, and bottles of oxygen and hydrogen to feed it. Every time they stopped and made camp they would have to recharge the batteries in their EMUs; and the power cells would have to keep them warm during the “nights.” There were spare lith canisters for scrubbing carbon dioxide from their suits’ circulation: precious, irreplaceable. Benacerraf packed a tent, the flimsy hemispherical affair taken from the skimmer.

  There were skis, improvised from pieces of Jitterbug’s frame. A length of rope. A small bag of tools. Spare parts for the gadgets that would have to keep them alive, Clancy clamps and silver bell wires. Their snow shovels. A medical kit, assembled by Rosenberg: cream for their hands and Benacerraf’s lips, powder and gel and antiseptic cream for skin afflictions and wounds, plasters for blisters, cuts and rubbed raw patches of skin, drugs and painkillers, Lomotil for diarrhea. They had pethidine and morphine—opium derivatives—and various forceps, scalpels, hypodermics and stitching needles.