Oceanworlds

by J. P. Landau

  “1,000 feet,” said the computer. Derya looked to the side: the horizon had been replaced by a wall a few hundred feet away. On it, he could see the irregular reflection of a small descending object. Us! He shifted himself to inspect the other side. The canyon was about a mile wide, besieged by the two arresting V-shaped walls becoming dead vertical in places. His heart shied and bolted as adrenaline dumped into his bloodstream.

  “700 feet.” It’s all too sudden.

  “600 feet.” The ground features began to resolve.

  “Sergei—Sergei, when do you plan to put the ship upright? Sergei!” Nothing but disturbing stillness.

  “500 feet.”

  “400 feet.”

  “300 feet.”

  “Speak to me, mate! Please!”

  “200 feet.”

  Caird rotated upright.

  “One hundred feet.” The landing area was clear from the stories-tall boulders, but Derya saw the dark ground interrupted regularly by deeper shadows.

  “Boulders below us! Abort!” Sergei didn’t react. “We are going to crash! Hurensohn! Scheißkerl!”

  Sergei activated the attitude control thrusters and Caird jittered, interrupting the descent. But instead of climbing, it began moving sideways directly against a fast-approaching, house-size ice boulder. The panic froze Derya like a rabbit caught in headlights. When the end was imminent Caird suddenly propelled itself in an upward diagonal barely conquering the icy rock, shutting down seconds later. It fell unhurriedly until the legs softly touched down and the spacecraft rested on firm ground at last.

  “My apologies, Derya. When I focus I shut down external voices.”

  Derya was stunned and confused. “What just happened?”

  “We landed on top of a flat boulder.”

  * * *

  20 To call it sturdy would be a defamation, thought Derya. By the time it touches down on Earth, the speed with respect to the ground needs to be pretty close to zero—otherwise the payload goes extinct. Yet orbital speed is 17,000 miles per hour, so the interim is bound to be hellish. Moving fast in thick atmosphere generates very serious friction, thus very serious heat. You must shave speed high up, where the atmosphere is thin, so the energy transformation from speed to heat is slower, making the capsule ‘only’ heat up to 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit, ‘just’ 40 percent of the Sun’s surface temperature. For this, you need to create a path of more resistance, which in today’s culture of lean is beautiful means esthetic concessions.

  The name says it all. The geometrical shape of all re-entry capsules is a frustum, a headless cone. The Dragon negotiates this ugliness by being taller and thinner than the competition, plus soft angles and a fashionable white color scheme.

  44 | Setting Up Camp

  A day later, September 7 2030. Main Mission day 4

  ENCELADUS

  It had been a few hours since landing and Sergei and Derya were finishing an unfulfilling dinner. Whatever remains of the pleasure of eating was left behind on board Shack, thought Derya. He was having fish and chips. Except there’s no distinguishable fish or chips, only this dark gray greasy rectangle with the texture of semolina—it’s not the treat but threat that passes food down the gullet.

  Coordinated Universal Time was obsolete. Like most natural satellites in the Solar System including our Moon, Enceladus is tidally locked to its planet. The same hemisphere faces toward Saturn all the time, and the Tiger Stripes are in the wrong direction. This meant the day was now thirty-three hours long, the time it took to complete an orbit. Daytime lasted half of that, although being inside a canyon shrank direct sunlight to nine hours. Out of this pit it’s still daylight but here it’s dusk.

  Derya strained his neck to lay his cheek against the hull under the window, which allowed him to see the top of the canyon. The tip of Baghdad’s eastern wall gleamed like myriad lighthouses lined up past the horizon, mirroring light toward the valley below, revealing some of its major features. When the real night falls an hour from now, the only illumination will be the Milky Way.

  “Suit up.” Derya was certain he misheard. “Suit up,” Sergei repeated.

  “It’s dark out. Dawn is in seventeen hours,” said Derya.

  “We’re going out.”

  “Are you … are you certifiable? We’ll freeze to death.” Being the brightest object in the Solar System is only possible by mirroring out every ray of light, making it the coldest object too. “Right now, it’s fifty degrees above the lowest temperature in the Universe, you ninny.”

  “We have tasks pending. Anchor Caird, microphones, antenna—”

  “Anchoring you said? As in a tent?”

  Sergei moved to a corner, grabbed a handrail, and started swaying. Soon after Derya felt two of the four Dragon legs go airborne. “Stop. Please stop. I get it.”

  “You knew ultra-low gravity rationally, not intuitively. Remember the American marshmallows jumping around the Moon? Gravity here is a fifteenth of that. Caird is eight tons but weighs 200 pounds here. Do not forget that.”

  “What about the cold?” said Derya.

  “What about it? There’s three ways of losing heat, physicist. Living things add a fourth: sweating. Convection and conduction require your atoms to transfer heat to other atoms. Vacuum comes from the Latin ‘empty,’ meaning of matter. And radiation is much slower than the other three. So, trust me—staying out for an hour won’t kill you. Take my word for it.”

  That commodity never traded too high, but now it’s worth zero as far as I’m concerned.

  Sergei continued, “It’s -360 Fahrenheit outside. During cryotherapy back on Earth, people get half-naked for three minutes inside a chamber that’s cooled with liquid nitrogen to -300. You ninny, whatever that means.”

  “I’m really not ready, Sergei. I need to think, I need to sleep. I need time.”

  “That’s a problem for which I have no solution. We start venting in twenty.”

  “Maybe I can stay?”

  “You know the protocol. Every moonwalk together.”

  The hatch opened to a frozen landscape that could have been Antarctica on a moonless night. As Derya descended the ladder, Sergei was already hammering and screwing stakes into the icy ground. His first steps served as an acquaintance with the new rules of gravity. It isn’t walking—nor floating—but an in between sort of bouncing. The two light beams from Derya’s helmet did the reconnaissance of the alien topography close by. The terrain seemed chaotic, fractured.

  “We’re three stories high. How do you plan to get down?” said Derya.

  “We jump.”

  “You don’t say. And how do we get back up?”

  Sergei squatted and jumped twice his height. “We jump. Let’s go.”

  Once more this feeling of being as useful as a mountain guide’s paying customer.

  The Russian grabbed the dish antenna and a box, scouted with headlights for the best drop, and disappeared over the edge of the boulder.

  Look at this maniac!

  With a heart running its own marathon, Derya followed panic-stricken. However, with no visual cues to feed his fright, the slow fall and landing ended up feeling almost peaceful.

  He became mortified. I endangered the mission and our lives. The boulders he screamed about before touchdown turned out to be stones no taller than his knee. Caird’s legs could have easily negotiated them. Thanks, gruff man, for the undeserved decency of not rubbing it in my face.

  In a few minutes, the high-gain antenna was erected. The dish was small, but it was never meant for yakking. Its main function was to send the output from sensors and instruments to Earth, where a legion of scientists would be crunching the data and fine-tuning the long list of activities to maximize the scientific return.

  Earth will be in line of sight only a third of the time. Derya looked up. After three years gazing at the rearview mirror, it took him little time to spot the inner planets and Jupiter. He concentrated on the bright dot with a sidekick right above the canyon shoulder.
So distant I’m staring at an eighty-minute-old image of the Earth. Meanwhile, countless pairs of eyes gaze at the here of eighty minutes ago—destined to forever pass each other unnoticed. He noticed Sergei watching him, patiently waiting.

  They got back to the base of the boulder. Derya jumped first but didn’t reach half its height. By the third attempt his head glimpsed Caird’s landing legs. On the fifth attempt he managed to rest his chest on the horizontal, but with nothing to grab on to he slid back down. He heard the rarest of occurrences, a laugh from Sergei.

  “A scientist distrustful of science. Escape velocity is 530 miles per hour. Not there yet.” Escape velocity is the minimum speed needed for an object to escape the gravitational influence of a massive body.

  Next time Derya shot with ample buffer, justifying to himself that the mental block was more about falling somewhere unsafe than catapulting out of Enceladus. It was an atavistic fear of both.

  “Forgot to ask how you did,” said Derya from upstairs.

  “Drove down two seismometers.”

  “Enough to characterize Enceladus’ interior. Come back up so I can go to sleep.”

  Two hours later, the cabin was repressurized and at room temperature, and with a new foul bouquet. Derya’s soiled spacesuit diaper stank out the capsule in the transit to the trash bag. I’ll maintain it was diarrhea until I die. The lights were off and Sergei was dormant, but Derya struggled to fall asleep. It was perfectly silent, except for the occasional creaking of Caird reacting to the outside temperature.

  After much trying, he gave up and glanced at the clock. Still eleven hours before sunrise.

  Moving quietly, he grabbed the flashlight and stuck it against the window to minimize reflection. The light was lost a few feet out in a curtain of white, the silhouette of thousands of snowflakes dancing in between. It was snowing. The geysers were back in business.

  He put on the headphones and worked on one of the ship’s screens. What he heard gave him goosebumps. The two seismometers, part of a suite of instruments to be deployed tomorrow, were already recording data. Derya was the first human to hear what Enceladus had hidden from prying eyes, the secret sound waves of the enormous ocean beneath, unaware of being wiretapped. If he didn’t know the scale the sensitive ears were recording, he could have sworn it was the arcane conversation among inscrutable creatures from the deep.

  The creaks and groans were the interaction between the thick ice shell and the formidable tides from the gravitational tug of Saturn, while the sharp pops and cracks were the local system of crevasses, subsurface lakes, and fractures connecting Baghdad with the global ocean miles underneath, currently being pulled open as Enceladus approached its farthest distance from the giant planet.

  The geysers were gushing intensifying jets of ocean water and organic particles, some much faster than the escape velocity and thus perpetually lost to the heavens beyond, feeding Saturn’s almost invisible E Ring far beyond its much more famous and brighter siblings.

  He lay back down again. Realizing they were perched on an ice crust floating on top of the vast ocean was enough to feel the ground rocking like an Indian canoe. Fearing a sleepless night—bad preparation for the demands of the next day—he swallowed a pill that took effect almost immediately.

  A beep made him turn to the big screen. The first messages from Earth had arrived. One of them was a historical nugget from late 2017, right before Cassini’s suicide plunge into Saturn, “Such mysteries are far too enticing to ignore. Perhaps someday, another robotic explorer will sail toward Saturn and turn up wonders we have yet to imagine.”

  45 | Alienscape

  A day later, September 8 2030. Main Mission day 5

  ENCELADUS

  Derya was like a child waiting for Santa. Still pitch dark, he thought. Either the clock is being lethargic or dawn loves the anticipation around here.

  Sergei’s snoring was becoming irregular and the wake-up alarm would trigger in less than an hour. Daybreak is imminent.

  But it never arrived.

  “Sergei! Sergei!” Derya cried, shaking a slumbering Sergei. “We’re in deep shit. We’re buried alive,” he said while pointing to an unlit window. The snow coat was hiding the daylight.

  The adrenaline bypassed all of Sergei’s morning rituals. Derya was already suiting up.

  After donning the spacesuits, they hastily checked each other twice.

  “Okay’d for emergency depressurization,” said Derya right before banging the code into the screen.

  Both knew that if depressurization didn’t work, they were in serious trouble. Opening the hatch without depressurization was impossible: like commercial airplanes the hatch opened inward, which here meant overcoming 5 psi of fierce internal pressure. But unlike them, the vacuum of space also sealed it shut from the outside as if it was welded closed.

  Sergei tried opening the hatch. It was jammed. Swearing loudly in Russian he tried again. The attempts became frantic. Never mind breaking the latch, that would be a worry for later.

  He stopped, panting over the intercom.

  They looked at each other. No words were needed.

  There will be no depressurization if the ice shell around Caird doesn’t allow some cabin air to be vented.

  Sergei placed the soles of his boots on each side of the hatch, grabbed the handle, and thrust his full body weight against it. One. Two. Three. On the fourth attempt it swung open.

  First Sergei, followed by Derya, emerged into a frozen world lit by a dwarfed Sun.

  The view is indescribable. Not even video footage could communicate its beauty, thought Derya.

  What from orbital altitude looked like one of many elephant skin wrinkles had become a deep canyon with menacing half-a-mile-tall walls over the basin. While further north the cliffs loosened into wide V-shaped slopes, here they overhung inward in a disregard for gravity that would have been impossible even for rock formations back on Earth. The moon’s curvature was extreme, any feature beyond a few miles fell behind the horizon. They could count many geysers in each direction, a procession of spurting whales, semi-transparent cones reaching impossible heights. Not all pointed and shot vertical, one was so slanted that it spewed below the rim, producing the effect of a giant waterfall pouring down. The surface surrounding Caird was a jagged terrain of outcrops and fissures, a chaotic mess of jumbled ridges, cracks, and plains, complete with hordes of icy boulders, some as high and wide as ten-story buildings. Everything aside from them appeared to be a black-and-white picture, occasionally stained by oily amber reflections from the Sun.

  Using a knife and fork as spatulas, they managed to break the crust around the capsule, which came off in big chunks like the shells of a boiled egg. The heat being radiated from inside created a fluid slush between ship and ice.

  Could have been this mission’s end, or a lot worse. It appears luck extends to the outer Solar System.

  The solution to prevent a similar trap in the future was a flimsy tepee door flap made from that wondrous space material used in you-were-supposed-to-die-but-you-made-it Apollo 13, duct tape.

  “Clearing twice a day should do,” said Sergei.

  “I’m starving. Dinner was twelve hours ago.”

  “That’s repressurizing and then venting to come out. Venting twice a day is too onerous.”

  Hard to believe, but more pleading broke Sergei’s resolution. They went back inside for breakfast.

  The working day started by boring microphones carrying small explosive charges around a predefined perimeter. When they were all in place, Derya detonated them. The bouncing of propagating sound waves at different depths was picked up by the microphone, allowing a precise determination of the height and stratification of the ice mass.

  The results were being beamed to Earth, where Mission Control needed to send back a surface spot and digging path for the Mole at some point later that day. This was now the critical path for the mission. The clock was definitely ticking. Each hour waiting was an hour wasted.
The first opportunity to reunite with Shack is almost certainly gone, thought Derya.

  Sergei was fixated on one of the long, bluish gaping crevasses from where the geysers originated, encircled by seracs with vertical walls vanishing into the deep darkness. The geysers were waning and in a few hours would shut down until the next orbit.

  “And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you,” said Derya.

  They went to Caird to retrieve the Mole. The coordinates hadn’t arrived, but every minute counted.

  After a while sitting idle outside, resting his back against the capsule, Sergei said, “The only real measure of progress is the cryobot a foot further from the surface. I’m starting the reactor.”

  Derya postponed its activation. By applying advanced psychological techniques—mostly threatening mutiny.21

  Within half an hour the triple ding of the incoming message resonated in both helmets. “Let’s go,” said Sergei.

  Three hours later, Waltzy Mole was upright, held in position by a tripod anchored to the frozen ground. An ultra-thin reinforced wire would be the link between Mole and surface, sending live data from the multi-sensored cryobot up to Caird as it burrowed down. The reactor had been activated and the bottom third of the robot was a scorching hot rod about to touch the surface and begin melting ice.

  The two explorers were back inside the capsule. Derya was triple-layered, looking through a window. Sergei was in underwear with Volume 4 of Gibbon’s 1789 behemoth The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire on his tablet. He interrupted his reading to shout, “This is the last time. Cut the bullshit and press the damn button.”

  “We’ve waited four years …” said Derya.