Saturn 3

by Steve Gallagher

  Air was easing back into the crewroom as he bent over the braincase canister. It had wedged in the locker and suffered no damage. He lifted it and set off for the launch bay.

  Three minutes, and Launch three nine two would reach the stage where abandonment would be inevitable. Unbalanced slightly by the weight of the metal cylinder the Captain-handler passed through the high-speed vacuum locks and emerged into the cavernous launch bay. A number of helmets swung to bear on him, cumbersome and anonymous like armour; one man gave a jerky, impatient wave, and the Captain signed an apology.

  If questions were to be asked, it would seem obvious that it was Benson who had spaced himself in a moment of black self-pity. If, by some remote chance, a body should be recovered—remote indeed, unless it fell into a trackable orbit—it would have Benson’s suit and Benson’s tags for identification. Obvious conclusions would be drawn from Benson’s failure in the courses of skills that were a prerequisite of promotion, and from the diagnosis of potential instability that the series of response-control tests had thrown up. Benson was top-grade scrapheap as far as Saturn Survey was concerned, and the stigmata of his failures would follow him back to Earth. He’d be lucky if he could even get a parenthood licence. He’d probably done everyone a favour when he’d taken the jump. Captain James would be unconnected with the whole affair—after all, hadn’t he gone and got himself buried on Tethys, teaching some robot to walk?

  The service lines were already being withdrawn from the small spacecraft when he reached it and swung up the short ladder to the cockpit. He put the braincase carefully through the hatch ahead of him and then followed it, turning awkwardly in the confined space of the craft’s interior to get to the command couch. The parts and systems that would make up the Demigod’s body were already loaded and secured but the blank, unrecorded braincase was the handler’s sole responsibility—quite appropriate when one considered the intimacy of contact that would be necessary during the period of the Demigod’s education.

  The bay doors were dropping, isolating the pad from the rest of the Saturn platform. The Captain chinned the switch in his helmet to open up his suit radio, and his head was instantly filled with the jargon and gabble of crosstalk. Somebody was wishing him a pleasant trip, but he didn’t respond; they would probably be cursing his lateness as soon as he was out of range.

  Launch bay lights went from white to red, and then began to flash warning as the countdown reached thirty seconds. Somewhere overhead the iris of the pad’s accelerator tunnel was opening, ready to receive the spacecraft and fling it with the predetermined accuracy of an O’Neill mass driver into a planetary orbit which would intersect Saturn’s “A” ring and emerge into the moon-cleared Cassini division for rendezvous with Tethys on the far side of the primary.

  The countdown reached zero, and a number of the switches on the craft’s control board flared green. He touched them in order, each light dying as his gloved finger brushed the etched glass; the fingers of the suit were a little too long for comfort, but he could live with it. The craft responded to the sequence by beginning its burn, a deep-felt tug and an illusory increase in weight as the pad dropped from below and the influence of the accelerator rings began to take hold from above; and then the Captain was suddenly slapped back in the command couch, speeding headlong down the tunnel and then out into free space and on to his own directional power.

  The sense of extreme forward motion was lost as the craft dropped away from the platform and moved towards a close orbit. There were no immediate points of reference here, and the universe became slow, bright and graceful to the observer. The craft was moving nearly parallel to the plane of the rings and it was almost possible to see them as a broad, solid highway of light, smooth and impenetrable; three uneven bands of reflective ice and dust, delineated with neat precision by the sweeping effect of Mimas, Enceladus and Tethys.

  Tethys would be a good place to get buried for a while.

  THREE

  Adam had told Alex about the impending visit less than an hour after his return with the samples in the buggy. As expected, she’d glowed at the change in routine, but then Adam was pleased to see that she began to share his trepidation without any prompting.

  “Help?” she said. “They’ve left us little enough to do. Why should we need help?”

  “I don’t know,” said Adam, sincere in his ignorance. “Some kind of robot is all they told me.”

  “We already have robots. We don’t need another.”

  “This one’s supposed to be special. Given time and training . . .”

  “Training? A robot?”

  Adam shrugged. “I only know what they told me.”

  He couldn’t bring himself to tell her the rest; not yet, anyway. That this new class of robot, with time and training, might eventually take over the duties of a human being . . . or two. And that a reposting on the Survey was unlikely to see them staying together; the Survey’s policy computer took no account of personal attachments, and Adam understood that such practices were out of fashion elsewhere in the system, anyway.

  But there was no point in worrying her without cause. In Adam’s experience, the introduction of new technology invariably created work and worry rather than abolished it; and a little more activity to fill the peaceful, empty days wouldn’t be unwelcome. And if Alex wanted to be alarmed at a possible separation it should be a spontaneous reaction, not one taken on cue from him; he valued her happiness more than his own, and he wouldn’t want a sense of youthful duty towards him to overcome and stifle it. Perhaps it was unfair to expect her to go on sharing this empty base with a much older man, cramping and curtailing her experience of life outside—but when he came to remember that life, his doubts dissolved and his fears subsided.

  When radio silence was broken by a reflected echo from the station’s own beacon they suited up and went to watch the landing. Adam had wanted to opt for caution, watching the spacecraft’s descent on one of the screens in the communications room, but this had obviously so disappointed Alex that he had relented and agreed that they should watch from the comparative safety of the outer hangar. It was a large opening and would give them a good view, and it had the added advantage that it could be slammed shut at emergency speed if there was any danger from the spacecraft’s approach.

  The craft overshot at first, making a full loop around the diminutive moon to come storming in again from the far horizon, swinging around as it dropped towards the base and lining up its landing legs. The pilot obviously knew about Tethys’s unusual composition because he cut the hot drives before they could brush the surface of the ground and bounced down the last few feet under the moon’s gentle pull. Even so, the locked gases began to boil and swirl, but they re-liquified almost instantly and hardened into a brittle crust around the settled craft.

  Adam and Alex moved forward from the hangar, two anonymous and indistinguishable figures in protective suits welcoming a guest into their home. The pilot had popped his hatch and was already halfway out of the craft, reaching back inside for something. He turned, bringing out a canister with a handle and cradling it in one arm as he descended. He reached the ground just as Adam and Alex arrived.

  “Captain James?” Adam hoped that their suit radios were set on the same wavelength. The pilot’s suit was a much more lightweight, modern design than his own, giving him the uncomfortable feeling that he was dressed in an antique.

  The pilot seemed to hesitate. Then he nodded, an action which involved an energetic use of head, shoulders and upper torso; and still he cradled the canister against his body with his arm.

  “Do you have any urgent unloads?” Adam lifted his hand to indicate the open hatchway, but the pilot signed no.

  Adam let Alex lead the way into the open lock. This seemed to confuse James, who was obviously unclear as to which of his hosts was which. The military set-up of the Saturn Survey placed great emphasis on rank and procedure, and James didn’t know whether to take precedence over or give way to the
last in the line. Adam rescued him from his uncertainty, inviting him to move on ahead with an expansive gesture.

  They filed through the open chamber, passing the dust-smeared buggy with its empty sample hoppers and moving on into the decontamination area. This was a standard feature of the Saturn bases, necessary not because there was any threat from alien organisms but to keep the moon’s fine dust out of the station’s breathing recycler.

  The three figures rocked slightly in the buffeting of the cleaning winds, and Adam reflected with some relief that he was still senior man at Saturn Three. The pilot, as betrayed by his suit flashes, was a probationary handler, probably fresh off the course and making his first solo drop. Technically he was still no more than a Captain and Adam, who had been bumped up to full Major in order to be consigned to the Tethys mausoleum, outranked him.

  The dying of the bright lights showed that the decontamination was over, and they moved on into the base crewroom. It was a section of the upper level of the main nucleus of the station, a vastly oversized repository for the suits and equipment of a staff of two. One wall was hung with ranks of heavy metal gas bottles, variously coded; the plain, uncoloured bottles were pressurised breathing mixture, whilst the blue and the yellow provided the vapour streams for surface quarrying. Of all the rows, the red-painted bottles were the least scuffed and marked; these were the high pressure burner grenades, rarely needed on cold Tethys.

  James took all of this in, and then swung back to look at his hosts. Both had already removed their pressure helmets, and he moved to set the canister down to do likewise. The intention petered out into nothing as he saw Alex.

  The girl was more than good-looking—she was actually attractive. This was an age where, thanks to the eugenics boards, looks could be taken for granted or, in extreme cases, bought from a surgical catalogue; but after the innumerable production-line faces of the women at home and on the platform Alex struck him with a freshness that was momentarily arresting. Nobody in space was wearing their hair so long, either; the novelty of this intrigued him further.

  “I’d like you to meet my partner,” Adam said, and James realised that he was still helmeted and holding the canister. He set the braincase down and broke the seals around the collar of his suit, lifting the heavy shell clear of his head before setting it down and holding out his hand.

  Alex took it, obviously uncertain of the ritual. James saw that she glanced at the older man for encouragement.

  “I guess you don’t get a lot of drop-ins on Saturn Three,” James said, as much to break the awkward silence as for any other reason.

  “Hardly any,” Alex said with a nervous grin. “Especially not that have come all the way out from Earth.”

  “I’ve been stationed at the survey platform for a while. It’s some time since I made the trip out.”

  Adam sensed an unusual enthusiasm from Alex, a kind of rapt attentiveness that always seemed to come over her when Earth was mentioned. She’d never visited the place, and her imagination seemed to enhance its squalor and make it into some unattainable enchanted kingdom.

  James broke away and moved towards the ramp which led down to the Central Nucleus of the station, stopping only to lift the braincase canister and take it with him.

  “Where are you from?” Adam called after, as he and Alex extracted themselves from their heavy suits.

  “My home town’s Terminal Five.” The ramp led down into darkness, breaking off into the beginnings of unlit corridors at intervals down its length. He turned, and saw Alex slipping out of the legs of her suit; the thin undersuit clung to her body with static, and James found the sight inexplicably engrossing.

  “I know Five,” Adam was saying. “Whereabouts were you?”

  James made an effort to concentrate. She was a girl, that was all—a working equal, available in off-duty hours by mutual agreement. He could approach her later. “Far side. The East Billions.” Then, when Adam shook his head to show that he didn’t know the zone, “Where were you?”

  “I spent a couple of terms in Billion Park. That’s some way away from the East zip.”

  “They’ve cleaned it out. It’s a dead cell now.”

  Adam made a noise of approval. “I didn’t know it, but it’s about time. The place was a hole.”

  “Yeah. Where isn’t?”

  Alex watched the conversation attentively, adding to her meagre store of knowledge about Earth.

  “Speaking of holes,” James said, looking pointedly around him, “you know what they say about Saturn Three?”

  “We’ve heard it,” Adam said sharply. It was an old joke, not very pleasant and not very funny, and Adam’s affection for Tethys caused him to be offended by its description as the asshole of the solar system.

  James didn’t seem to be inclined to take off his pressure suit, nor was he going to part with his canister. Adam led the way down the ramp and this time Alex was last in line. James obviously didn’t intend to make the same mistake over rank twice.

  They came into the general living quarters and James glanced around, unable to conceal a mild amusement.

  “Most of what you see is the original station equipment,” Adam explained, conscious of how unfashionable the furnishings must seem to the newcomer and irritated that he should feel it necessary to apologise. “We don’t get many ship-ins from home, and with only the two of us on the base the stuff doesn’t get much wear.”

  James set the canister down and then let himself drop on to a low divan. He bounced a couple of times, experimentally. “Takes me back,” he said.

  “Don’t you have lay-lows on Earth?” Alex asked in surprise.

  “Used to, but better than these. These are practically antiques. They don’t even mould around you when you sit on them.”

  Adam said, “How is Earth, Captain?”

  James’ condescending smile froze, and Adam knew that he’d scored a hit. “Why do you want to ask a question like that? You get the bulletins, don’t you?”

  “We acknowledge them, but we don’t always make the scan. There’s so little that has much bearing on us, Captain.”

  There it was again. At the mention of his real rank as opposed to his probationary appointment, James seemed to flinch slightly. Adam decided to remember it; you could never tell when some minor weakness like that might be useful.

  Alex brought glasses of amber juice, a vegetable beer with a mild kick that she brewed with one of the experimental yeast cultures from the protein tanks. “Since you ask about earth,” James said as he accepted a tall glass, “I can tell you in one word. Hungry.”

  “When was she ever anything else?” Adam said. “The more people you have sitting on the land, the less land you’ve got to grow them food.”

  “What about the seas?” said Alex. “I thought you were supposed to be farming the seas.”

  “Seas are packed with kelp—so much, it rots before you can get it harvested. It’s no good and it’s not enough. That’s why everybody’s looking to the Saturn and Jupiter Surveys to come up with a usable protein cake.”

  “It’s a long way off,” Adam admitted. “There are so many permutations. About a year ago we got a protein molecule out of the methane—it looked really promising until we started on the acceptability tests. It poisoned half our stock of paramecium.”

  “You know Saturn Three’s running last on the research scale?”

  “I know it,” Adam said, “but what can we do as long as all the funds and equipment get funnelled into Six on Titan?”

  “That isn’t exactly the case,” James protested.

  “Of course it is. They’re not particularly concerned with running a balanced programme. All they want to do is put on a better show than the Jupiter Survey.”

  “We’ve got no contact with the Jupiter Survey.”

  “Not on our level. Here on Three we sometimes wonder if we’ve got any contact with our own administration. I’m no biochemist, I’m a spacer. Alex here got basic lab assistant’s training on H
yperion before it got closed down, and that’s it. We don’t even get computer time outside our own facility, so we have to get most of our results on guesswork. Are they really surprised that we’re making no progress?”

  James spread his hands wide to show that he didn’t want to give Adam an argument. “That’s why I’m here.”

  “So they send us another robot to keep us happy.”

  “Not just another robot,” said James, indicating the canister as if it should mean something to them. “And anyway, you can hardly complain about being out of contact if you won’t even scan the bulletins.”

  “No.” Adam made himself smile, tried to force himself to relax. He’d never beaten the drum for Saturn Three before, and wasn’t really sure why he was doing it now; the last thing that he could want would be for the base to be run back up to full operational status. Gone would be the calm tranquillity of quiet Tethys, swept away by a cold-faced army of ambitious Service types pouring through its corridors and filling the labs. Gone also would be the open innocence of Alex as she had to learn to adapt to their society, to harden herself to their casual lack of personal feelings.

  He was bridling for no other reason than that there was somebody else moving freely around a place that he’d come to regard as his own. Because of these territorial feelings he tended to take offence at James’s disdain over the unfashionable fittings of the base, and to seek some crack in James’s armour for a retaliation—hence Adam’s pleasure at finding that James was sensitive about his rank. It was childish. He’d try to put it out of his mind.

  “The message we got said something about a training period,” he said.

  James nodded. “A few weeks, couple of months at the most. That’s as long as we don’t hit problems . . .”