Oceanworlds

  The discussion boiled down to oxygen. Shackleton’s engines used methane as fuel and oxygen as oxidizer, in the exact ratio of one pound to 3.6 pounds. The visit to Titan gave access to unlimited methane, but it cost them non-replenishable oxygen. By the time James sealed the leak, methane had dropped to 23 percent from what it was right before the accident, while oxygen remained unaffected at 100 percent. After escaping Titan, the budget stood at 69 percent on both methane and oxygen. Enough to approach Earth but not enough to decelerate to an acceptable speed to initiate re-entry. This left two options, both dealing with the challenge of slowing down as close as possible to five miles per second, the routine speed for Earth atmospheric re-entries.

  Derya’s pick was a ballistic lob, researched for the Apollo program but finally archived due to its complexity. It had never been tried before. The spaceship enters Earth’s upper atmosphere, decelerates at the cost of heating up, then skims back into space to cool down. Repeat again. And again. The number of ‘agains’ to erase over ten miles per second is high, and without a fuel buffer each one has the risk of entering at too steep an angle, in which case it can’t escape back to space and burns in atmospheric hell, or too shallow, in which case it bounces too far into space and skips Earth for good.

  Sergei and Sophia’s alternative was opportunistic. Saturn orbits around the Sun every twenty-nine Earth years. Jupiter, at less than half the distance to our star, takes twelve. They were currently not only on the same side of the Sun, but Jupiter was at a relatively close distance from the direct trajectory between Saturn and Earth. By modifying Shackleton’s path, they could intercept Jupiter. Then, by sailing close to the giant and going against its rotation, the spaceship would achieve a reverse gravitational slingshot, decelerating a couple of miles per second depending on how close to Jupiter they were willing to tread. The penalty was delaying the return by eight to nine weeks and being exposed to Jupiter’s magnetic field, by far the strongest in the Solar System after the sunspots on the Sun’s surface.

  “You two seem to have grown fond of the gas giants. I have not,” said Derya. “Do you even know how much radiation we would be exposed to?”

  “There are ways around that,” said Sophia.

  “Oh yeah? A couple of Band-Aids to reattach a severed leg? You would also stretch out our return by months.”

  “We always had a food and oxygen buffer. Now it’s 40 percent larger,” said Sergei.

  Derya knew they were answering out of respect. The decision had already been made.

  MISSION CONTROL @ HANGAR ONE, CALIFORNIA

  It was past midnight. The fishbowl was deserted except for two, and the entire hangar was for once silent. Even the vitals of the crew, displayed on one of the large screens, showed them to be sleeping.

  Nitha sat on a chair, leaning forward and rocking anxiously like a teenager in detention. The good news is that they picked Jupiter. The bad news is that they picked Jupiter. I never thought it would be this hard.

  “I’m going now, boss. You go to sleep soon, okay?” said Nico, one of the mission specialists.

  “Yes … Nico,” she said, lost in thought.

  He walked out but then stopped, turning. “What’s going on, Nitha?” After a few seconds of silence, he continued, “I know you’ve—we’ve lost a lot. The recent events have been terrible … but they’ve also been miraculous. And the future looks bright. We’ll do everything from this room. They don’t need to do anything during the reverse slingshot around Jupiter.”

  “Yes they do, Nico. They need to survive.”

  75 | Hyperion

  Four days later, October 2 2030. Day 29

  LEAVING THE SATURN SYSTEM

  Sophia and Sergei’s eyeballs were locked on Bacchus’ Observation Window while Derya’s were glued to his telescope’s eyepiece.

  It had started as a tribute to James, who back on Earth did not convince enough people to put the moon among the secondary mission objectives. Somebody at Mission Control had realized that after re-routing to recover Caird, a minor course correction allowed for a close encounter with Hyperion right as Shackleton escaped the Saturn System.

  The three were bewitched by the floating potato. With no point of reference in the darkness of space, it could well have been the size of a fist—the apparent size from their vantage point—instead of its 220 miles in length.

  Hyperion was full of secrets. It was the largest body known with such a highly irregular shape. Gravity should have enforced a more spherical form. It was saturated with deep, sharp-edged craters that made it look like both a sea sponge and a honeycomb, including one that covered half of one of its sides. Scanning its surface, it was indisputable there needed to be a lot of empty space inside, a porous interior. It was also a requirement to justify why such a colossal impact didn’t shatter it to pieces and, instead, hard-pressed a crater seventy-five miles long and a Mariana Trench in depth.

  It was also the biggest body known to have chaotic rotation, which made it impossible to predict which side would be simultaneously facing Shackleton and the Sun, requirements for tonight’s single-chance scouting.

  With the moon face set, Derya at last identified what appeared to be a moving shadow inside a potential cave. He set it as the primary target for pointing the instruments. TiTus set the parameters for the radar and laser altimeter.

  “Hell, may as well go all in,” said Derya. “TiTus, increase laser pulses per second beyond the manufacturer’s threshold. We need the highest topographical spatial resolution we can possibly get.”

  “Done, Derya. Commander, closest approach in 196 seconds. Instrumentation ready for data capture,” said TiTus. In an unexpected gesture, Sergei, the heir apparent, had declined the commander rank in favor of Sophia.

  Six, five, four, three, two, one. It all happened within seconds. No fireworks, no special sound effects. The instruments looked as quiet and passive as they did before. Did they bungle it?

  Derya’s face relaxed into a grin. He began manipulating his tablet and replaced the iconic Earth landscape around the curved fuselage wall with a strip of ground from Hyperion superposed with layers and filters. He made a close-up of a surface feature and rotated it. A two-dimensional hole became a three-dimensional zucchini.

  “You’re looking at a cave almost three miles deep, apparently a few hundred yards in width, with a mouth eighty-seven feet in diameter,” said Derya. “Carved in ultra-strong water ice, with walls miles thick. Just this one cavern is thousands of times the volume of Shackleton. A space habitat only missing a door really … and if we found one, it’s probably full of them. A veritable Swiss cheese. We could connect them from the inside and turn it into a giant colony of hundreds of thousands of people. An ungainly, potato-shaped spaceship with the surface area of Great Britain, waiting patiently for billions of years for its occupants to arrive.”

  “We could bring nuclear reactors and house them in caves isolated from living things by hundreds of yards of pure ice, which at these temperatures is stronger than steel,” said Sergei.

  “Yes! With the heat we melt water,” said Derya. “With the electricity we split water into hydrogen and oxygen. We pump oxygen and pressurize the cave system to one atmosphere, sea level on Earth. With hydrogen and oxygen, we have unlimited rocket propellant. And as we map the maze of caves and tunnels and get progressively deeper into Hyperion, we find its rocky core, where we mine iron and other metals to expand into new colonies on other moons. We plant forests inside—”

  “And the view!” Sophia joined in excitedly.

  “Best in the Solar System,” said Sergei, infected with the merry spirit.

  “This is the essence of human space exploration. Serendipity,” said Sophia. “It wasn’t among the mission objectives because no one, not even Jimmy, saw this coming. Whatever happens, I think we can safely claim to have taken more than a few timid steps in making humanity a spacefaring civilization. We made this count, Jimmy.”

  The sharp snipping sound of il
legally clipped toenails in Bacchus pleased Derya. In the same guilty-but-gratifying way of daring a vile one out at dinner and triumphantly blaming it on Yi, he thought, grinning. But it was late and knowing the chance of getting caught was negligible detracted a bit from the experience. As he proceeded with the filing part of the ritual, he fancied life after their return. Politics is definitely calling my name. It should please Father—I mean, if that doesn’t sway him, nothing ever will. And then yesterday’s wholly unexpected email from Karl. Whichever way you read it, it’s a love letter. He had reread it enough times to quote it from memory. Why not? I say we give him another chance. People do change. I changed. At the sight of his reflection on the Observation Window, the nail file jerked out of his fingers. He was repulsed. Maybe drop politics and become Notre-Dame’s bell-ringer instead. By the time he searched for the nail file it was, predictably, gone. That’s why everything has Velcro, you fool.

  Derya wasn’t sleepy. The Observation Window displayed the Milky Way’s thick disc sprayed from side to side and dots of light sprinkled everywhere else. Saturn had been banished from it for good. He felt the urge to look at it one last time and asked TiTus to show recorded footage. The wall screen filled with the giant orb. After a few minutes he noticed a barely discernable succession of chickenpox smudges on its surface, scattered across like a bandoleer. Explosions smearing the cloud tops. He searched around the screen for the date and felt a ripple of goosebumps before he fully absorbed the information: September 15, a few hours before James’ accident.

  Without warning, a dam brimming with repressed emotions gave in abruptly and completely, releasing an unstoppable flood. As he wept, he felt an almost physical sadness gradually wash away, and by the end of that night the only thing left was gratitude for his two friends.

  76 | Decoding Aliens

  July 16 2031. Return Day 291; 2.1 Years to Earth

  HANNOVER, GERMANY

  Messegelände Hannover, one of the world’s largest convention centers, was teeming with a very specific crowd: scientists. The masses were predominantly young with no prevalence of lab coats, rimmed glasses, or eggheads. It could have been a rock concert, and in many ways it was, at least for the keynote speaker.

  The assembly of over 100,000 attendees made it the most wide-ranging, cross-disciplinary scientific conference ever, smashing the previous record three times over. The usual walls that grow and harden around different fields had crumbled under an irrepressible force exerted from billions of miles away, by microscopic entities occupying a space smaller than a hundredth of a pinhead.

  Chemistry, biology, and medicine were particularly well represented as the overall sentiment was that some of the most important breakthroughs of the coming decades in each of those fields would spawn from the extraterrestrial biological cargo on board Shackleton.

  Everyone walking these grounds already knew the two people, one on and the other one off our planet, who would soon be collecting Nobel and Breakthrough Prizes. One of them would present in less than an hour. There was no need to look at the fairground map to figure out where the keynote presentation would take place. Everyone headed to the same location.

  The vast majority of attendees were outside the protection of the pavilion in the open-air space under an unforgiving summer Sun clocking ninety-four degrees in the shade. Yet nobody seemed to mind. There was change in the air and everyone could feel it.

  Belinda walked onstage with her left hand in her pocket, holding onto the speech tightly. The arena burst into applause and the cheering lasted for over a minute. Trying to disguise her self-consciousness, she focused on the one person not standing, an old man with a cane seated in the third row. He clapped, watching her with a caring, compassionate smile. It was one of those rare moments when two perfect strangers could communicate with no need for words. He knows how it feels to lose the person you love. It reminded her of Leonard: in their phone conversation the month prior, he had told her between sobs masked as coughs from his emphysema, “a son should never die before his …” He said ‘elders’ but he meant ‘father.’

  “—and in our scientific quest for the truth, the first question we must answer is ‘What.’ What am I seeing under the microscope? Then we must solve the ‘How.’ How does that chromosome transfer instructions to the proteins? But the really essential, all-encompassing question is ‘Why.’ Why does the book of life use four letters instead of two, or twenty-six? Through my personal loss, through the long healing process ahead, I have come to realize the ‘Why’ can also help to make sense of Jimmy’s death.” She stopped out of necessity yet remained stoic and composed.

  “Soon after we started dating, Jimmy confided that he thought he had been born 200 years too late. To him, a life without adventure was a life without meaning. One of his climbing heroes, Reinhold Messner, once said ‘without the possibility of death, true adventure is not possible.’ He told me this because it was fair play, a full disclosure of sorts. I needed to know what I was getting myself into. Maybe his call was to go where no man had gone before … to reopen the frontier. To launch a new golden era of exploration. To nudge those free spirits craving adventure to fulfill their destiny and drive us all forward. It turns out my Jimmy is—was—a continuation of a long and distinguished breed of pioneers.

  “One of his predecessors was a woman by the name of Marie Skłodowska, better known as Marie Curie, who also gave her life for something worthwhile. Decades conducting trailblazing research on radioactivity irredeemably damaged her DNA. Even today her notebook is so radioactive it’s kept in a lead box. She was the first person of a grand total of four to win two Nobel Prizes, and the only person to ever win a Nobel Prize in two different sciences, physics and chemistry. Then the answer to the ‘Why’ … a ‘Why’ I need to learn to live with … is that individual sacrifice may be needed for society to progress, to expand our horizons, to improve our well-being, to better ourselves. You … we … are richer because of their sacrifice.”

  As seconds of applause went by, the out-of-sync clapping forged into a single, sharp, thunderous ovation that rebelled against its ephemeral nature.

  “What I’m about to tell you, we owe to them … these are very preliminary results that haven’t yet scratched the surface. Sophia and I have seen maybe a hundredth of a percent of what awaits us, a revolution in life sciences that will likely know no boundaries. You won’t hear any real answers today, mostly more questions. Yet we’re starting to tackle the really essential, sweeping one. The ‘Why.’

  “For hundreds of years of scientific inquiry, the answer to one of the most fundamental questions has remained off-limits: why does all life on Earth descend from a single ancestor? We believed that the first spark, the one that switched life on, was extraordinarily improbable. We now know, however, that extraordinarily improbable does not mean extraordinarily rare, because of two ingredients: time and repetition. An example is the several million chemical reactions per second occurring in each one of our cells. Given enough time, on the order of millions of years, chemistry will flourish into stunning complexity. We can assert this because it’s a fact that life has begun, independently, at least twice in our dear but humble Solar System.

  “Today we can also tackle another sweeping question. Was that first chemical structure that crossed the threshold of inanimate matter the best solution to the life equation? The two, possibly independent, strains of life found on Enceladus categorically say ‘no.’ The universe of chemical possibilities is huge. For instance, the number of possible proteins one hundred amino acids long built from combinations of the twenty amino acids naturally produced by our body, is larger than the number of atoms in the Universe. Life on Earth or Enceladus did not have the time to try all possible sequences before appointing the best. Rather than a quest for ultimate perfection, the creation and evolution of life is a haphazard result of trial and error that picks whatever works first. Many features of today’s biology are not optimizations or improvisations for the modern wor
ld but vestiges from ancient times that were too costly to replace … and the implications of all this are, as we will see, far-reaching.”

  She stopped and took a sip of sparkling water from a plastic bottle, enlarged 1,000 times on the screen behind her; the bubbles fizzing and popping turned into symbolic harbingers of what was coming.

  “Why does the genetic code, the book of all life on Earth, use four letters? By inference, the answer seems to be ‘just because.’ The two Enceladus life forms took vastly different roads from our own and from each other when it came to the information challenge. The genetic code from the carbon-silicon microbe is extremely efficient, using the minimum viable alphabet size: two letters, just as computers do with their zeros and ones. The carbon-based life, however, which should have been our natural choice as test subject, uses nine or possibly ten letters.

  “This shaped our research. Sophia asked me to devote all of our time to the lesser-known carbon-silicon so we could dig deeper and extract as much information as possible before re-entry … in case something goes wrong. And so we left the familiarity of the carbon world in exchange for the simplicity of carbon-silicon’s genetic language. So far it seems to have been the right decision.

  “When our civilization decoded the human genome in the year 2000, the ensuing celebration commemorated one of the most impressive achievements in the history of science as well as the beginning of a new era where death and diseases would be conquered. That enthusiasm proved premature. The sobering reality is that there isn’t just a single gene out of our 19,000 that’s devoted to intelligence, or longevity, or eyesight. Instead it is the combination of many, which makes the problem exceptionally hard, even seemingly impossible at times. Because we do have the answer to everything in front of our very eyes, but each answer is a sentence of unknown length, fragmented in an unknown number of volumes, in unknown locations around the library of DNA.