Oceanworlds

  Years of patient waiting had turned into days of anxious anticipation. Derya was desperate to be back in their home-away-from-home. With the mission completed, the prospect of heading back to Earth agitated his mind at all times. He missed people. Random ones will be fine, he thought. And lots of weather: the sound of rain tapping the roof, of wind rocking the trees. Being outside. The simple things in life. The important things in life. Instead, here they were: two men for two weeks in a capsule with the internal space of an SUV. It was at these moments when it helped him to consider 1965’s Gemini 7, when Jim Lovell and Frank Borman lived for fourteen straight days orbiting Earth in a space the size of the front seats of a Volkswagen Beetle.

  He remembered to check on the little children residing inside the Petri dish. Derya moved the sealed container under the microscope, and as soon as he rested his eye on the ocular his body experienced goosebumps. Something had changed, a lot. The computer quantified the hunch: Albus Darya and Noctem Darya had multiplied many times during the last day. He promptly sent the data to Earth with the headline “I believe there are grounds to get drunk today.” No need to be an expert to understand the significance. The results speak not about what’s in the Petri dish, but about what’s not. It means there’s a violent Darwinian ecosystem down there keeping them contained … it means the two life forms are at or near the bottom of the food pyramid … it means there’s bigger, perhaps much bigger, beings concealed in the dark waters of Enceladus.

  57 | Saturn

  Moments later

  ORBITING SATURN

  Sophia had grown uneasy watching the immensity of Saturn through the flight deck’s Observation Window. Even at Shackleton’s height, 1,700 miles over its cloud tops—seven times higher than the ISS orbited the Earth—the horizon line looked uncompromisingly straight. The circularity of the planet was only given away by the infinity of the curving rings overhead.

  They were still on the dark side, but silvery sunlight mirrored by the rings elucidated the turbulent rivers of clouds below in dim bleached gray. Something curious kept happening to her. The scale of Saturn’s upper atmosphere currents and eddies and fuzzy canyons—some larger than her home planet—inevitably tricked the brain into discarding facts and embracing visual cues: the spaceship could only really be cruising a couple of miles above the clouds.

  But what turned her stomach were the irregular lightning bursts beneath them, revealing the planet’s innards and exposing the vertical structures of the huge swirling masses of gas. At those moments, the deceiving heavenly pastoral illusion of the dayside revealed its true bottomless depth.

  James agreed to rotate the ship so the Observation Window looked away from the orb into the starry sky. The thrusters gradually turned them with a force comparable to a person moving a school bus by tapping it. The wonder of weightlessness, she thought.

  “—then why do you expect our bodies to need re-acclimatizing? We’ve been under partial gravity at night, we have no meaningful bone loss …” said Yi.

  “Boy, I don’t know,” said James. “I’m simply extrapolating from coming back to Earth after my stint on the ISS. Muscles are 3D, so using them does not guarantee they won’t be rusty in certain positions—”

  “Sorry to interrupt,” said Sophia, doing mid-air somersaults above James and Yi, both in their seats at the flight deck. “Q for Yi. What should be the brightest thing in the sky from here? Jupiter, no?”

  “By far,” said Yi.

  “My take,” continued James, “is that the leg muscles will be atrophied for walking under Earth’s gravity, which means we’ll be enjoying traveling to places mostly by watching television, at least the first few—”

  “How many moons does Jupiter have?” cut in Sophia.

  “Seventy-nine total, but unlike Saturn only four have any meaningful size,” said Yi. “Sorry, Jimmy. So, what’s your take on food?”

  “Disappointing news too if you were dreaming of stabbing the proverbial steak that keeps ambushing my mind. It may go down the muzzle, but only to spring back as beef pudding soaked in gastric juice. And the heartburn after! Not pretty. After six years of spartan diet, your intestinal bacteria will be xenophobic, radicalized, and diehard.”

  This time Yi gestured for an interruption. “You can’t see Jupiter’s moons from here without a scope.” About to go on, James was stopped by another announced interjection. “Also, Jupiter is in the opposite direction to where you’re looking—sorry, Jimmy.”

  Sophia halted her whistling.

  “In any case,” James continued, “we’ll be quarantined for a month. Adjust expectations. Better to assume hospital food during that time.”

  Sophia had canceled her spinning and looked intently out of the window. When the reticence of being ridiculed succumbed to the fear of being right she whispered, “There’s something strange about those stars …” She held her breath, hoping to hear James laugh.

  Instead, he said in a stern voice, “Sophia, come to your seat. Now.”

  Yi froze as he watched thousands of shiny stars coming at them. In spite or because of the panic, he connected the dots in one sweeping moment of clarity. That Saturn explosion seen from Earth in March, he thought. The measles-like spots peppered across its face a week ago … they were impact scars—And I’m looking at their common source. The gleaming diamonds swarming the sky could only be the fragments of an icy visitor ripped apart when Saturn’s tidal forces eclipsed its gravitational self-attraction. And the thirty-degree inclination from the planet’s equator betrays their origin. Somewhere in the outer reaches of the Solar System. It’s like Jimmy’s dream … only on the wrong planet.

  “What do we do?” Sophia’s alarmed voice echoed in the back of Yi’s mind.

  “We wait,” answered James in a severe but controlled voice. “There’s nothing we can do. They should fly past us.”

  Yi’s lucidity seemed to have come at the expense of controlling his body, which felt paralyzed. His hands were clamped to the seat as if spot-welded in place. He vaguely sensed James slamming a helmet on his head, noticing the visor turning the white comet fragments into sepia and the click when it locked in place.

  Debris began crossing Yi’s field of vision at such speed his eyes couldn’t resolve shapes, just the blur.

  A thump shocked Shackleton. For a few seconds it seemed to have stopped at that, but soon his head and body were commanded to lean left by a growing centrifugal force.

  His sense of time disappeared and his conscience divided reality into constituent parts. His eyes noticed the revolving, repeating shadows. Then he heard muted shouts from James. Then he was aware of his body being governed by an invisible force.

  He had become a wax sculpture. This is how Stephen Hawking must have felt. A racing brain cloistered inside a broken shell—barring a miracle, we’ll be sucked into the savage abyss of Saturn, something so deep, dense, and hot that even hydrogen and helium eventually become metallic.

  Yi, impotent, watched James in awe. If miracles exist, this one carries Jimmy’s name.

  James was terrified but at this time that was the opposite of petrified. He would fight until the end. If I need to slay destiny, I will, he thought.

  “Methane fuel tank has been compromised,” declared TiTus in its anodyne voice, with a calmness that could only come from artificial intelligence. “Estimating 440 to 470 seconds before depletion.”

  “Locate … the leak,” James shouted. He tried to move but the centrifugal force kept sucking him back into the seat. “I need … you to … neutralize the—” James’ inner ear told him the spinning was becoming more tolerable. It doesn’t make sense—until he started sensing the vibrations in his spine.

  The spinning was decreasing, the shaking was intensifying.

  “Commander, the precise hull location cannot be identified,” TiTus said.

  The atmospheric friction was acting on Shackleton’s delta wings to cancel the rotation. James raised his head to the Observation Window, now entire
ly filled with yellow and orange hues. No, there’s a thin blueish horizon line whirling around the window. There’s still hope. They were sinking diagonally.

  “Height!”

  “970 miles.”

  No longer pinned to the wall, James unlocked the seat harness. “Reverse stalling,” he said, while clambering out.

  “It is not advised,” answered TiTus. “Without proper damage assessment, igniting the engines can lead to an uncontrolled combustion.”

  Translation: Shackleton explodes into a ball of fire. “You’re the pilot now, TiTus. Use the thrusters to decrease pitch or we’re toast. Sophia, I need you. Follow me to the cargo door.”

  He propelled himself with an abrupt kick in the direction of the cargo area. This time the straight glide he had repeated to perfection for years sent him slamming into one of the walls, as the spaceship was buffeted by the atmosphere.

  Yi expelled a dispirited, “Shit.”

  Far ahead, the hazy brownish air between them and the cloud tops hundreds of miles below was being replaced not by one but two bright yellow suns setting the night alight. The biggest was developing a vast deck above, optically distorted as a mirage. He forgot about himself and witnessed the aftermath of two fiery bombs set aflame with the power of a million Hiroshimas. The expansion across Saturn’s upper atmosphere was swift and two familiar mushrooms abandoned their spherical shape into small Saturns, becoming gargantuan trees, turning into scorching clouds climbing ever higher with burgeoning halos around them.

  A flashing wall beacon confirmed the emergency depressurization was complete. The cargo area was now equalized to the external pressure.

  Sophia finished mounting the backpack propulsion unit on James’ back and he sprung forward and opened the cargo door to an exterior no longer black.

  Following the emergency procedure, Sophia started preparing the Dragon.

  James exited the spaceship and even though the atmosphere was still tenuous he felt the density of the air for the first time in three years. He hooked the two tethers to a handrail and moved toward the ship’s rear. He knew speed was mandatory, not only for the leak but because maintaining grip with the ship would soon become impossible and the thickening air would shortly burn through his suit. His muscles noticed every tick in the escalating g-force.

  James’ mind had emptied to nothing but the path onward, actively avoiding glimpsing at the immensity before him. Grab the handrail with your right hand. Move forward. Unclip the tether with your left. Stretch the arm and clip higher. Repeat—this is too slow. He let go of one tether, which fell sideways and became taut, as if fastened to an invisible hook.

  He identified the leak a dozen feet away, bleeding a gush of methane into Saturn’s atmosphere.

  His breathing was heavy and his movements unsteady. The ship was shaking hard.

  “The fuel tank is almost depleted!” he heard over the intercom.

  The next hurling frontwards was cut short by a yank. He looked at his harness. Having forgotten to unclip, the tight tether went back eight feet. Retracing was not a possibility, so he detached his harness from it. His hands were now the only things connecting him to Shackleton.

  “TiTus, get ready to fire the engines on my command,” he shouted, panting.

  “Aye aye, Commander.”

  James got within an arm’s length from the sprouting leak, a hole the size of a fist. Freeing a hand, he grabbed from his harness a mechanical seal that looked like a screwdriver. He tried inserting it inside the hull but the pressure of the escaping methane kept winning. If only I had a tether to free both hands. He almost lost the device in his progressively frantic jamming. The lactic acid in his arms was stiffening and weakening his grip. Now or never. He drove his hand into the leak with all he had and pressed the trigger.

  On the hull’s interior the front detonated open into a metallic umbrella that the methane’s own pressure locked into place against the inside wall of the tank. The leak cut off.

  “Start the engines!”

  James counted on a human response lag, which TiTus didn’t have. The thrust was instant as the engines blasted into full power to climb out of the atmosphere. He looked in astonishment at both his hands, freed. With human response lag his right hand lunged for his life, but the separation was already twice as long as his arms. He was no longer attached to the ship. Emma! Belinda!

  Sophia’s screams of joy were heart-wrenching. I know something that you don’t. He powered his propulsion unit in desperation but being little more than a few aerosol cans joined together, it proved pointless.

  “I’m detached! I detached from Shack!”

  For a moment his plea was received with ungrateful silence.

  “Shut down the engines, TiTus,” yelled Sophia.

  The sense of being airborne, skydiving toward Saturn’s cloud tops, was disorienting, sickening, and terrifying, but he forced himself to speak back, “TiTus—don’t. Do not. That’s an order.”

  Shackleton was diverging fast, already hundreds of feet away.

  James scanned around for the first time. Picture the most memorable flight you ever took, on top of puffy clouds dyed in sunset orange. Unfasten the seatbelt. Eliminate the seat. Erase the airplane.

  Sophia’s voice was shaky, “I’m freeing the Dragon … I’m going in to rescue you …”

  The atmosphere was heating his spacesuit. Both his body and brain wanted to shut down, as if self-preservation was no longer capable of wrestling against the g-force and ghastly terror. He heard himself as if he had unfolded in two, the soul listening to the body. “NO! We have only one … task … saving Shack.”

  He blacked out shortly after.

  The unmanned Dragon disengaged from Shackleton, firing its engines and diving toward James, tracking his spacesuit. He was not even a dot anymore.

  Shackleton escaped the claws of gravity and exited Saturn’s atmosphere, re-achieving orbit.

  Sophia drifted into the flight deck, sobbing uncontrollably. Yi remained motionless in his seat, holding his head in his hands.

  She saw James’ vital signs on the screen. He was still alive. His heartbeat was under one hundred.

  “He’s unconscious.” Yi’s voice came out in grunts.

  The Dragon was closing in fast on James. In less than two minutes the reading ‘1,570 feet’ rekindled Sophia’s hope. Her overcast eyes stared through the Observation Window, even as she knew human sight couldn’t possibly resolve the two infinitesimal specks against the endless background of clouds far, far below.

  ‘1,140 feet’ … ‘890 feet’

  “Jimmy, over … Jimmy, over. Can you see the Dragon? Over.”

  ‘560 feet’ … ‘350 feet’

  “Jimmy! Jimmy, please!”

  ‘287 feet’ … ‘209 feet’ … ‘134 feet’

  The heartbeat monitor on the screen jumped by twenty.

  James was still alive only because his body flew the ten miles a second in an exceedingly gradual atmospheric entry angle toward Saturn. Regaining consciousness, he could perceive his limbs burning, but without pain. All his senses except his sight remained suppressed, which is why it took a while before he identified a faint, indistinct sound. Concentrating on his ears, he finally heard, “JIMMY! LOOK AROUND!”

  He took over a minute to clasp the Dragon’s hatch handle. Getting in was grueling. Contracting his body to enter changed his aerodynamic profile, sending him upward, downward, sideways.

  Once inside, he began to feel the skin sizzling. Burns be damned, nobody ever died from pain.

  “I’m in,” he managed to utter.

  “We are telecommanding the Dragon. You have fifteen seconds to strap to the seat.” James was startled to hear a very formal Yi, almost aloof.

  Sophia’s voice was hopeful. “Jimmy! You’re 240 miles from exiting the atmosphere. You’ll do this!”

  James felt the tug with his eyes closed, promptly falling into an involuntary drowse while the cabin re-pressurized.

  An incr
edulous Sophia gaped at Yi. “What … happened? What’s going on?”

  He avoided looking back but her stare broke him at last. The mask was gone. His face became congested and, in weightlessness, tears formed around his eyelids.

  Yi pressed the digital button to cut communication with the Dragon, which since Sophia had already done moments before, resumed transmission instead. “He won’t make it … there was never enough fuel in the Dragon to save him.”

  Sophia could no longer control the shuddering. “Why? Why didn’t you say so?”

  “Because I can’t bear,” Yi broke down but tried again, “because I can’t bear the thought of him knowing he’s about to die.”

  James heard. I will never embrace my Emma, that little person I love more than life itself.

  He lost consciousness soon after. The console read 17-g, higher than the murderous acceleration of a seat ejecting from a fighter jet.

  58 | Into Saturn

  Minutes later

  A throbbing twinge stirred James awake. Where am I? His awareness was dulled and his memory was an impenetrable fog interrupted by two lighthouses, Emma and Belinda smiling at him. But the vision made him wary. It felt like an old postcard, real yet bygone. Where am I? He tried to concentrate and noticed an acute pain in his head, as if someone had squashed his brain inside the skull of a child. His eyes rested on his lap. The bright blue of his spacesuit had become a dark olive. He sniffed a pungent charred smell. Trying in vain to remove his helmet, he noticed the numbness of his hands. He had no feeling under the wrists. WHERE AM I? Struggling, he managed to unlock his left glove. An ebony hand came off with two fingers replaced by mostly skinless yellowy bones. His mind tried to stop the swelling suspicion, sensing a terrible truth. It circumvented logic in a desperate attempt to bury reality. I made it? I made it! An irrational euphoria persuaded him for a moment, but it was bright outside the Dragon’s windows, which wasn’t unusual but outright wrong in zero gravity. Am I … dreaming? He closed his eyes and noticed the subtle rocking of the capsule as well as a hissing sound outside. The reality landed on him like a mace. The Dragon is gliding—the air is cushioning the free fall. The capsule had somehow fallen into the gas giant at an angle that shaved speed without incinerating the vehicle on entry or subjecting him to lethal g-forces. The twenty miles per second had become a terminal velocity of 150 miles per hour, much like a skydiver back on Earth. The Dragon was no longer battling gravity. It was falling into it. The burns on his body were so deep they had seared his nerve endings. That’s why the pain is tolerable. But the grief was not. Escaping from it, he took refuge in his body. The real pain won’t start for several days, when the nerve endings grow back and sense the carnage around them … but there’s no ‘several days’ for you, he reminded himself. He desperately searched for another distraction. He felt the compression on his back and an intense lumbago. Out of ideas, he was forced to confront the truth. There was no fear of death, only the desolation at having lost Emma and Belinda forever.