Oceanworlds

by J. P. Landau

  He freed the straps of his harness and moved to one of the five windows. What he saw was both the most beautiful sight and the saddest moment of his life.

  If he hadn’t known that the limitless, fathomless whiteness of magnificently detailed cumulonimbus clouds around him were the upper cloud decks of Saturn’s troposphere, Heaven would have been the natural guess. His only sense of scale and distance was indirect: no clouds looked close enough to break the illusion of solid into ephemeral phantoms of vapor and gas, which could only mean everything was far away and immense. By contrasting their plunging speed—he preferred ‘they’ instead of ‘him,’ it felt less lonely—against the null change in perspective, James understood that the cloud pillar they seemed to be almost brushing against was instead distant and fabulously tall, shooting dozens of miles above them. Much like childhood memories of staring at the sky while lying on the grass, the majestic collection of soaring ridges, bottomless gorges, plateaus, and rivers of clouds around them kept shapeshifting. At moments the skyscape resembled a Japanese forest in winter, a blanket of white over cones of cotton, where any of the trees measured in Everests. At others it turned into Canyonlands National Park, full of stacks and arch formations shooting heavenward. At another an Eden of cauliflowers. And now the spray and body of a huge wave smashing against coastal spits and outcrops.

  But any illusions of Heaven or Valhalla were dispelled the moment he looked down. The clouds were engaged in a chaotic dance, driven by the fastest winds in the Solar System after Neptune, many times stronger than the worst storm ever recorded on Earth. If he were to deploy the Dragon’s parachutes, the vicious lateral buffeting would cancel out the fall as they got sucked into Earth-wide belts endlessly circling the giant, the spacecraft becoming a blender battering James into a fertilizer bag of vaguely human shape. He could see they were dropping toward a vast low-pressure zone where convection currents sank planets-worth of gas into Saturn’s depths, a cosmic Niagara Falls.

  The wound in James’ soul martyred him, bleeding despair and melancholia. He spent a long time in contemplation, waiting for a grisly death. The further they sank, the worse it would get. At their speed it would take days to cover the distance to the center of Saturn. He imagined the voyage ahead. The dreamy clouds beneath were made of ammonia. After an hour cutting through them, they would arrive at a familiar water cloud layer, an agreeable ambient temperature but with a punishing level of pressure. From there things would go south. As they continued uncloaking Saturn’s much-hypothesized interior, the air density would keep creeping up, slowing them down while pressure and temperature outcompeted each other. At some point the hydrogen would liquefy under the titanic pressure to become a hydrogen ocean. Friction and static electricity would create massive lightning arcs all around. Deeper down, the Sun’s surface temperature would become comparatively crisp while the pressure would be thousands of times higher than the crushing depths of Earth’s deepest ocean trenches. Hydrogen becomes metallic as its single electron collapses into the atom’s nucleus. This new state of degenerate matter conducts electricity, creating the planet’s powerful, crackling magnetic fields. After this ninth circle of Hell, the gates to Saturn’s inferno would be near: the giant’s core. The spacecraft’s composites, however, would melt much, much higher in Saturn’s elemental abyss, and prior to that the pressure would collapse the Dragon into a stamp. And yet, the thought of becoming a part of Saturn was strangely soothing to James.

  He had a couple of hours as he awaited his execution. Time to put things in order.

  James shifted to the console, determined to give meaning to his otherwise senseless death sentence. He activated the sensors’ recording of temperature, pressure, and wind speed, turning the Dragon into a much-dreamed of, never-before-implemented meteorological descent probe. My loss will be science’s gain.

  He instructed the Dragon to link and begin transferring data to Shackleton.

  59 | Leadership

  Moments later

  Yi was startled when data began streaming from the Dragon. I thought we had lost contact for good. He saw Sophia’s eyes glittering with newfound exuberance.

  “Jimmy! Jimmy, can you hear us?” Sophia screamed after activating the intercom.

  “Sophia … don’t. Look at his vitals … he’s gone.” James’ health information was no longer displayed on the flight deck’s screens.

  Minutes before, TiTus had reminded them that Yi was in charge now, as third in the chain of command after James and Sergei. Shackleton’s situation required immediate attention but Yi was drained of any willpower. I need sleep. The dreadful silence was interrupted by Sophia, staring at him. “What do we do now?”

  It took time for Yi to ride through the invisible obstacle of acknowledging that James was dead. “We have already burned our ticket home. There’s not enough fuel to go back to Earth …” He restrained himself from saying more. All luck comes to an end. We may be breathing, but we are dead. Which, infringing upon basic human survival instinct, felt preferable to carrying the weight of James’ death.

  “No! No, no, no, no. I won’t accept losing his life for nothing!”

  “Sophia, I’m the commander now. To honor Jimmy,” he stopped and inhaled a few times, trying to reign over his desolation, “the best we can do is keep orbiting Saturn … try by all means available to rendezvous with Derya and Sergei before it’s too late for them, decode as much as you can from the alien microbes … and then organize and prioritize the terabytes of data to keep transmitting information to Earth well past our—our expiration date.”

  “No,” she replied defiantly. “We will play the one wild card we have.”

  Yi looked at her, clueless. What’s she talking about?

  “Titan,” she asserted.

  “Don’t tell me it’s because of its methane seas …” said Yi. Sophia’s face remained impassive. “That’s lunacy!” In other circumstances he could have laughed at such an outlandish proposal.

  “That’s your fighting instinct?”

  “That’s my rational brain thinking. We won’t compromise the biggest scientific payload in history for having one shot at a … a hopelessly improbable outcome,” said Yi.

  “That may be true, but we can’t and we won’t condemn Derya and Sergei to death without them having a say—TiTus, do we have enough fuel to make it to Titan and attempt a landing?”

  “That’s enough!” Yi could have stopped at that but chose to give more perspective. “Think coldly for a moment. You know at what depth on Earth diamonds are made, available in quantities we can’t even fathom? About one hundred miles under our feet. Yet nobody is making the business case to go and get them. You know why? Do you know why? Because it seems close but it’s unreachable.” She won’t cave, he realized looking at her stubborn face.

  “We’re on board Shackleton.”

  “So what?” said Yi, confused.

  He could almost hear the gears inside Sophia’s brain turning. “Probabilities can freeze you from attempting something crazy,” she said. “What were the odds of dying when Ernest Shackleton decided to cross the Antarctic Ocean on a dinghy? Nine out of ten, at best?”

  “Tweety, we are as close to Titan as medieval people were from flying. You may get the illusion that it’s attainable but don’t be deceived. It’s impossible. Stop this nonsense … that’s an order.”

  “If you’re unwilling to look for a solution, you’re no longer my captain.”

  TiTus interrupted the conversation. “Affirmative, Sophia. Preliminary calculations show there should be enough propellant to land on Titan.”

  “Could we use some of that propellant to modify our trajectory and rendezvous with Caird before heading to Titan?” asked Sophia.

  “Sophia,” said Yi.

  “That requires extensive simulation. It cannot be assessed currently,” said TiTus.

  “Start working on it,” said Sophia. And staring at Yi she continued, “Then we figure how to land. And then we figure how to�
�I don’t know—refuel, I guess. We do it piecemeal, one step at a time.”

  “I’m sorry, Sophia, but that request requires commander clearance,” said TiTus.

  Yi wanted to be upset. But a captain unwilling to sail is just a misnamed longshoreman. Instead look at her, refusing to give up. After a long pause he said, “TiTus, do whatever Sophia asks.”

  Past the roadblock of hesitation, Sophia did not spare an instant. Two minutes later, the SOS message rushed to Earth at light-speed.

  Sunlight had greatly diminished past the seas of ammonia crystal clouds above. Having cleared that, the Dragon now cut through hazy but otherwise clean space, with the next deck of water clouds still far away beneath. The light reflecting and refracting from the canopies of clouds gave an ethereal glow punctuated by the occasional rainbow. The world of fleeting shadows from before, flared away in an instant by almighty Sun strikes, was raided by ever more confident penumbras, and all would soon be stormed and reigned over by darkness.

  For the time being, the billows underneath mirrored the rolling, spiraling streams of white overhead, which in a free fall where the bottom seemed to never approach and the top never retreat, made James feel trapped inside a celestial casket with the arrow of time broken.

  He kept rewatching the two videos sent for his birthday ten days before. Emma walking solemnly to the camera with a birthday cake. The ‘y’ frosting letter of ‘Daddy’ about to fall off its side. The other was from Belinda undressing for him. “My boy, not a minute goes by without your face, your voice, your laugh. Three years have been a long time, but the next three will fly by.”

  Why? He had kept asking himself. Not anymore. He chose to believe his sacrifice puzzled out the enigma of the recurrent nightmare of his past. A comet killed me. I took humanity’s spot. It gave him a sense of closure and made the heartache ever so slightly more tolerable.

  Within minutes the shaking got noticeably worse and soon after it became unbearable. It’s time.

  He repeatedly tried to record his goodbye voice message to Belinda, but every few seconds a wind gust would smack the Dragon, leaving him battered and wheezing. She can never know the distress I’m going through. To her my death will have happened suddenly and peacefully.

  To Sophia and Yi he was already dead—James had done it to spare them from pointless suffering. But he was being forced to talk to them one final time.

  As a last resort, he called Shackleton.

  “Jimmy, I can’t,” said a distressed Sophia. “You know me. I’m not a leader. I never have and never will—”

  “I brought you all here.” James’ voice was heavily distorted by white noise. “There’s no more time, Sophia. You are the new commander. Promise me you’ll do everything to get the four of you back home alive.”

  Sophia broke down. “I—promise.”

  After the short exchange she had nothing left to say. It was an awful feeling. Three close friends separated by circumstance, unable to find common ground anymore.

  “I’m so sorry … please forgive me, Jimmy … I wish it could have been me,” Yi managed between sobs.

  “Jimmy …” But Sophia’s throat no longer emitted intelligible sounds.

  A minute later every fiber inside her was rebelling, but she couldn’t quit. James was dying as he dictated a goodbye that nobody but Belinda should have heard. She concentrated on the increasingly incomprehensible words behind a wall of static while trying to keep her grief at bay.

  Yi pleaded again, “Jimmy … please … you can end it all … depressurize the cabin.” Suicide was the one way out of a horrible death but James was not quitting.

  “—don’t fail. Make this count—” were the last words they heard from Saturn.

  Thousands of miles beneath them the Dragon fell erratically through an endless cloudy abyss of darks and grays, brightened momentarily by monstrous electrical storms.

  James’ last conscious thought was his failure to free Belinda. He meant to say she should find someone else, but there was no force capable of making him say it.

  60 | The News

  Minutes later

  CANBERRA, AUSTRALIA

  It was 5:39 AM, yet the sheep-dotted rolling hills of green surrounding the Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex were already discernible, carved sharply against the dark blue sky that was steadily being invaded by spring daylight. Those hills—shielding a bowl-shaped valley from line-of-sight electromagnetic noise from radios, telephones, and televisions—convinced NASA in 1965 to turn this immaculate countryside into one of the three facilities 120 degrees apart, the other two being in Spain and California, that handle all communication to and from every mission in outer space.

  At the end of a windy road coming from Canberra, a sign hanging at the entrance gate reminded visitors to turn off cellphones and laptops to “help listen to the whispers from space.” Here, amongst the six massive dish antennas stationed on site, there was also a smaller, older-looking one. At 08:18 UTC, July 20 1969, this third of the world was directly under Neil Armstrong when he took the first steps on the Moon and declared, “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” All images and sounds from that historic moment were intercepted and transmitted to a speechless world from that lone piece of metal.

  Now this part of the world pointed at Saturn.

  The Control Room, with its futuristic screens and floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out at the towering white bowls scattered over the rolling meadows, was staffed with five highly caffeinated technicians counting down the minutes for the first day shift. Space never sleeps.

  They were alerted of the incoming data by five beeps. The behemoth 200-foot dish began rotating to lock onto the signal from Saturn. At the time of reception, after traveling a billion miles, the signal was a murmur from space billions of times weaker than the power of a mechanical wristwatch.

  Immediately after the handshake between the computers and the radio signal from Saturn, the screens displayed the downlink information oscillating like heartbeats in an electrocardiogram. T-tump-t-tump-t-tump. As the sequence of zeros and ones were decoded, the bloke under the “Post Office of the Universe” sign started the customary process of validating the data. Even after nine years working there, the drowsiness of a long night, and the routine nature of the operation, the first lines of translated binary code always gave him a warm jolt of wonder. This time was different. The adrenaline surged through his body while he experienced an emotional shock. Choking up, he managed to say, “David … there’s been an accident.”

  SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA

  The ‘PRIVATE’ caller ID on the ringing phone could only mean Enceladus news. Belinda answered eagerly but the person at the other end remained silent. “Yes? Anyone there?” She was going to hang up when she noticed the strained breathing on the other end of the line. “Yes?”

  “Please … talk to me,” she said softly. The specter of her nightmares reappeared fully formed. Her body started shivering. And then, just the way he said “Belinda” was enough to make her fall to her knees. “Please no,” a plea no longer directed at him.

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  At the end, the President’s convenience became secondary to the need for a very large room capable of remotely connecting multiple counterparts around the world. While this was a decision where no single country had jurisdiction, a formal United Nations Security Council emergency meeting would have required high-ranking officials physically present in New York, something unachievable at such short notice. The meeting was set to happen in an hour. The heads of state of China, Colombia, France, Germany, India, Japan, Morocco, Nigeria, Peru, Russia, Singapore, Sudan, Sweden, Ukraine, the United Kingdom, and the United States—as permanent and current non-permanent members—would each have veto power. The rest were invited to participate as guests. To avoid airport delays, the US President was flying from the UN Headquarters in New York City to the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. in the Marine One helicopter.

 
; In the meantime, important American bureaucrats who should and some who shouldn’t have been there were trying to hammer out the recommendation for the President. Even with direct prohibition from the White House, quite a few were taking advantage of the chaos to leak scoops to the media.

  The civility of the room was hanging by a thread.

  “—the Titan ‘plan’ requires a long sequence of events, each one of them going from hard to extremely hard; and every single one needs to resolve flawlessly for this to have a chance at succeeding. First, managing to rendezvous with Caird; second, entering Titan’s ultra-dense atmosphere; third, sticking the landing; fourth, sticking the landing by the shore of one of the methane seas or lakes; fifth, said sea or lake needing to be of nearly pure methane instead of a mixture of ethane or nitrogen. I skipped many critical middle steps and I won’t even mention what happens in the improbable case that all goes according to plan and they manage to exit Titan. Starting with the sobering fact they almost certainly won’t have enough fuel to decelerate for Earth’s re-entry. Multiply those probabilities, and their odds of surviving very quickly become zero. In summary, the reality of the situation does not support your optimism. I apologize for being so blunt, but these are dead men walking.”