Oceanworlds

by J. P. Landau

  “Excuse me, who are you?” said Tom Doyle, US Senator, war veteran, retired Navy Captain, and former NASA astronaut.

  “Stephen Helvey, the new Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Space Policy.”

  “Yes, but who are you besides the fancy government title … what have you actually done for this country besides cashing a monthly check?”

  “With all due respect, Senator Doyle, I don’t think there’s a need to be condescending or confrontational. You may not know me, but I pride myself with a flawless and exemplary career in public service. Regarding today’s subject—”

  “Son, my problem with people like yourself is that in that compact bureaucratic mind of yours, somehow today’s subject is the same as tomorrow’s or yesterday’s. To you, what we are debating is just one more paper to be rubber stamped and archived … but you are profoundly wrong when you extrapolate your worth into those exceptional five—four stranded on Saturn. This long stopped being a private enterprise with crew from a few nations. They are the spearhead of our civilization, of our species. They are not only our heroes, they are our soul. They are our hope for a different future. A better future. This is a momentous time for humanity. We cannot abandon them … let me remind you what the President said an hour ago: we are not in the business of finding fault, but in the business of finding hope, however slight. If they make it back, it will be through sheer will despite everything stacked against them. We should do everything within our reach, however humble, to help bring them back alive. Right now, that little something happens to be the elimination of a nonsensical legal hurdle, which they could very well ignore anyway. And besides, who around this table or indeed anywhere on this planet has the right to condemn them to die? Nobody, and most certainly not you, or me.”

  “Excuse me, Senator,” said Helvey, “but I have a duty to represent the high-profile individuals, including some scientists, who oppose manned landing on Titan—”

  “Tell me who they are, because I’ll personally go and punch their yellow bellies and kick their wimpy asses. Goddamn sons of bitches.”

  The room erupted into chaos. Despite repeated calls for order, the clamoring got worse until the blaring, coarse shouting of an Army General prevailed, “ORDER! Stop this damn circus,” and once it quieted down, he said, “Senator, your point is clear and shared by many … however, I think it’s good to hear from the minority. Continue, Hillbil.”

  “It’s Helvey, sir. And to be perfectly frank, I wouldn’t be so adamant about calling us a minority. I think you are bound to be surprised … I want to first remind the room about planetary protection and ask each of you to forget for a moment the spiritual attachment to the mission and its crew. Article IX of the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, which the vast majority of the world has ratified, requires nations exploring celestial bodies to, and I’m quoting, ‘conduct exploration of them so as to avoid their harmful contamination and also adverse changes in the environment of the Earth resulting from the introduction of extraterrestrial matter and, where necessary, shall adopt appropriate measures for this purpose.’ Our own National Aeronautics and Space Administration has designated Titan as a Planetary Protection Class V Restricted Earth Return body, which concerns the protection of Earth from back contamination resulting from extraterrestrial samples, which in this case corresponds to an entire manned spaceship, which not only could potentially but will actually be carrying back indigenous extraterrestrial life forms … in this regard it states in no uncertain terms, and I’m reading, ‘the absolute prohibition of destructive impact upon return to Earth.’ And as all of you know by now, in the, uh, improbable case that everything goes well and they start closing in on Earth, they will be running on fumes at a speed so great to make any rendezvous impossible, which is definitely not enough to guarantee a successful landing with any sort of safety margin. Which is to say, there’s a—and I would say rather high—likelihood that they will burn up on re-entry, dispersing said extraterrestrial life into the four winds.”

  “Are you hearing yourself, Hilly?” asked Miriam Silberstein, Chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Space, Science, and Competitiveness, “Your assessment may be legally accurate, but it’s factually wrong. You can’t possibly paint a probe return sample and Shackleton with the same brush. That’s just insensitive and frankly ignorant. If they make it out of the Saturn system, they will have three years to conduct all necessary tests and actions, monitored from Earth, to make re-entry safe no matter what the outcome turns out to be … I also find it hard to believe there’s more than a few misfits opposing the landing on Titan. We Americans are naturally predisposed to exploration and adventure, going back to the Manifest Destiny of the 19th century. Just watch Hollywood movies, we love it when the good guys conquer adversity. It feels almost preordained that Shackleton finds itself stranded just like Shackleton’s expedition in 1915, beyond the longest sea ever crossed. And just like then, the human spirit will prevail.”

  Other officials came to Helvey’s defense, counter-arguing the assault. The discussion was heating up again when a lanky clerk stormed into the room. Helvey was not the only one to look at him with slight contempt, noticing the likely purchase of his ill-fitting attire from Ross Dress for Less. His scornful grin disappeared when the clerk cried out, panting, “The decision has already been made.” He ruined the confusion and anticipation by blurting out, “They are calling it the first worldwide referendum … over 1,700 million people have stampeded to Facebook … to cast their vote … and over 13 million are joining every minute … to have their say about the question ‘Should Shackleton be allowed to land on Titan?’” He stopped to recover his breath. His gasping was the only noise in a room filled with over seventy people.

  “And?” someone finally spoke in exasperation.

  “Until now, 98 percent approve,” he said.

  The news took seconds of complete silence to decant. The importance of the meeting deflated to little more than a class reunion.

  “Besides Hillbil, who are the morons of the 2 percent?” said somebody.

  “A planetary decision to a planetary challenge,” said another.

  “This is the twilight of politics. Us old dogs better start learning new tricks,” stated yet another.

  “This may be the mission’s greatest legacy,” declared a fourth.

  61 | Murphy’s Law

  Hours later

  ENCELADUS

  Derya stared at the screen in disbelief. There is no way this is happening, for two reasons. Make it three, he thought. First, I’m experiencing a strong déjà vu, meaning it’s all really just a bogus memory trace. Second, I’m biting my right thumb and it isn’t bleeding. Third, it would be not merely unfair but extraordinarily and immensely undeserved. Fourth, it would mean we are supremely, utterly, and irrevocably fucked. He took his finger out of his mouth. It looked like a red latex glove stolen from a porn shop. Ach Nein.

  The SOS message was terse, clear, and unsparing:

  ***URGENT*** SHACKLETON HAS SUFFERED CATASTROPHIC ACCIDENT. FUEL TANK COMPROMISED & NEARLY DEPLETED. JAMES EGGER IS DEAD. SHACKLETON HEADING FOR TITAN LANDING. RENDEZVOUS WITH CAIRD ONLY POSSIBLE **TODAY** AT 20:41 UTC. ***ACT IMMEDIATELY***

  Heilige scheiße.

  Mission Control intentionally sent the message sparse and clinical, so there could be no possible misunderstanding and not a moment was wasted. Now, exactly 180 eternal seconds later, an emergency audio message arrived in the inbox and played automatically. It was from Nitha. Brief and to the point. Jimmy was dead. Derya’s mind couldn’t really assimilate the words. The extreme gravity and urgency of the situation was, however, fully absorbed. A crisis so acute that somebody has decided attempting a refueling on Titan is somehow the most viable course of action—‘viable’ being insultingly hyperbolic. And this was, comparatively, the good news.

  Due to the combination of the oppressive rules of orbital mechanics and the destitute condition of Shackleton’s fuel tank, the one and only close encounte
r with Enceladus as it headed to Titan would be more hand waving than handshake, flying by 2,000 miles away. But that’s just the beginning. The approach was happening in—he read it again slowly as four lives depended on it—three hours and fifty-seven minutes. Noooow … fifty-six. In other circumstances this would be laughable and not even worth trying, but Caird would run out of water and oxygen in a week. Missing the bus meant the final curtain. But this is a communist collective, an astral kibbutz: if Shack cannot rendezvous with Caird and recover our good Sergei as pilot, my capital punishment gets immediately apportioned to Sophia and Yi as well. Which takes us to the elephant outside the room: not a moment will be wasted, but minutes or even hours; since, strictly complying with Murphy’s Law, Sergei Dmitrievich Lazarev is still strolling beyond the horizon. On Earth, radio waves may work indirectly by bouncing off the upper atmosphere in all directions. But in the void environment of Enceladus, the laws of physics are unbendable: communication only works in direct line of sight. The Ruski will remain blissfully unaware until he decides to reappear.

  Derya wanted to prepare, but there was nothing to prepare without Sergei. All the sensors would be simply abandoned, and that was the extent of his getting ready. Meanwhile, every extra second decreased their chance of rendezvous.

  The longest forty-nine minutes of his life by a factor of 1,000 eventually went by. “Caird over. I’m coming back.”

  Derya felt a perverse glee answering, “There has been an accident. Jimmy is dead and we must rendezvous with Shackleton in … three hours and seven minutes. Otherwise, we die.” Remembering Sergei may have been suicidal as of late, he added for effect, “The four of us die.”

  Sergei’s sickening angst was back. His deliberate and unnecessary protocol violation had likely condemned the entire crew.

  “MOVE, MOVE, MOVE!” he kept shouting at himself, his ears ringing from the clamor.

  After his jetpack ran out of juice, Enceladus’ negligible gravity slowed him almost to a halt. He was prairie prancing, bound by a very lax gravity. He climbed in thin air at an impossible height before coming gently down. Things improved whenever he encountered a boulder. He slowed down a few feet beforehand to then propel himself by pushing his legs against it, creating a comparatively speedy horizontal flight.

  In his desperation, he thought it possible for TiTus to maneuver autonomously a perfectly planned and executed Titan entry sequence, except for the visual identification of the exact landing spot, which would need to be done by Sophia and Yi. The risk of failure would be very high, but anything below 100 percent was quickly becoming a boon.

  Except Derya was not having it.

  “Leave me here I said!”

  “You have no seniority over me,” answered Derya.

  “You are compromising the entire mission.”

  “No. You did.”

  The last 1,000 feet it took Sergei to reach Caird felt immortal. Derya was living a nightmare with a werewolf closing in on him while he ran for his life up an escalator moving backward.

  Finally, Caird took off from Baghdad carrying the most sensational discovery of modern times, having perhaps a 70/30 chance of losing it along with everything else.

  As Caird transitioned from vertical climb to horizontal speeding over the shrouded oceanworld of Enceladus, the vantage point gave perspective to the canyon they lived inside of for the last ten days, recycled constantly by its unusual icy crust spreading. Like a conveyor belt operated by Atlas, hefty sheets of ice were forced out one end and driven back into the ground at the other, with a breathing, moving minefield of colossal shards in between.

  The radio came alive with that familiar, unintentionally histrionic modulation. Yi’s voice was optimistic, but the residue of distress was apparent in the pitch and pauses.

  “Sophia and myself … you … you can’t understand how eager we are to have the two of you back with us soon.”

  “Where’s your commander?” asked Sergei.

  “Sophia … she’s not coping well. I convinced her to take a tranquilizer. She’s in her cabin, aware but lethargic … Mission Control said the rendezvous depends 100 percent on Caird converging on speed and aligning in direction, so we’re just bystanders really …”

  “That’s correct. It’s good to hear from you, my friend.” Coming from any other person this would have been an everyday comment, but Yi flushed at Sergei’s words.

  “Likewise … friend,” probably sounding more awkward than needed, “and thanks to you, and Jimmy, for committing us to aerocapture when we arrived at Saturn. Without the extra propellant we would be finished.”

  “Hold your horses, mandarin cowboy,” said Derya. “Salvation is still an optical illusion, or as the French would say, a mirage.”

  62 | Brainstorming

  Moments later

  MISSION CONTROL @ HANGAR ONE, CALIFORNIA

  The Control Room had become a throwback to the days around Shackleton’s launch. As she entered, Nitha swallowed a lump in her throat. Seeing her twenty-seven Mission Specialists and the Navigation Team staring back at her, everyone as stationary as a tin soldier, could only mean one thing.

  She searched around the room for the Navigation Team’s chief engineer, “Kostya, we are only accepting good news today.”

  “Caird won’t make it,” said Kostya flatly. Nitha made an effort to keep her characteristic determination but became unsteady enough to rest her small frame against one of the long desks. Kostya continued, pointing to the screen wall, “You can see it on the orbital trajectory display.”

  “I only see Shackleton,” she said.

  “Yes, unfortunately. The signal we’re receiving from Enceladus shows that Caird hadn’t launched as of eighty-seven minutes ago. This means they can’t make it. Caird won’t be able to close in on Shack by a speed delta between 960 and 1,540 feet per second, depending on when they finally took off.” The uneasy silence forced him to continue speaking, “They took too long. They will be a hair’s distance from rendezvous … I’m terribly sorry things turned out this way …”

  “How close?” Nitha asked.

  “I was speaking in outer-space scales, so, well, the distance between, uh, call it Miami and Tokyo.” As if trivia made it less cruel, he added, “At least there’s no chance they’ll see each other. It would be like trying to spot an airplane flying above Florida from Japan, but moving sixty times faster.”

  Everyone was silent and motionless except for minor head movement.

  In a very physical way, Nitha breathed out her frustration and inhaled her doggedness back. “First things first—who knows of this?”

  “Nobody besides us here,” said Kostya confidently.

  “All right. This can never leave the room.” She took the time to glance at each person present. “No one else should know Sergei cost us the rendezvous. We’re a team. Somebody screws up, we cover it as a group. I’ll take the blame. A brief press conference stating a mathematical blunder that gave us false hope. If anyone disagrees, now’s the time to say so … good. Because besides the need for compassion—especially since … the loss in Saturn and given it’s Sergei—the disclosure of this to the crew could escalate personal tensions, derailing any plan to save them … which takes us to the next question: how do we recover from this?”

  “Everyone on my team is bringing sleeping bags and we’ll work 24/7 until Shack touches down on Titan,” said Kostya. “We just talked to SpaceX and working jointly we think it’s possible to make the necessary adjustments to their algorithms and to code them into TiTus for an autonomous atmospheric guidance and touchdown without Sergei. There will be a lot of finger crossing but we think there’s a decent—well, a probability—of making it down safe … however, the Grasshopper’s role is crucial so its team is also moving in, sleeping bags and all.”

  “Great. You people are awesome. Okay, what about Caird?”

  This time a hush fell over the Control Room again. Nitha looked around for Luca, the head of the Caird team. He shook hi
s head heavily.

  “No, no, no! There must be a way,” said Nitha.

  “There’s really no way to—to save Derya and Sergei. They run out of oxygen in nine days and, and even if everything goes splendidly with the refueling, they will be dead by the time Shackleton leaves Titan. It’s not happening before two weeks. Plus, two to four days to reach them …”

  Nitha swept her stare across the room. “We’re all engineers here. You’re telling me there’s no solution whatsoever? How’s that even thinkable? I want each one of you, individually, to tell me it’s impossible to my face. Right now.”

  There was an awkward tumult. Everyone seemed embarrassed and uncomfortable. This was much more than a professional defeat, even beyond their failure to Sophia, Yi, Derya, and Sergei. This was an affront to human ingenuity.

  After an inordinate amount of time, when the wretchedness and tension were making the air stifling, an engineer named Andie, one of the older ones, said bashfully, “I think there’s a way. We would need to run the numbers and do a bunch of simulations, because, I mean, we’re really breaking Caird’s propellant piggybank here, but my preliminary analysis,” she accommodated her throat, “shows that we can send them … to the rings—” She stopped after seeing a legion of rolling eyes.