Titan (14 page)

Benacerraf got it. It could be that a judicious, sensitively-handled wind-down of Shuttle would be the criterion on which Hadamard would be judged: on which the rest of his career might depend.

“Sure. So what about the components? What do we do with the three remaining orbiters?”

“You’ve heard some of the suggestions. You’ll hear more. The dreamers at Marshall want to respond to the Chinese, to go to the Moon. As ever. The USAF want nuclear space battle stations, or to practice sub-orbital bomb runs over Moscow. The Navy want to use the birds as target practice. And so on.”

“Do you have a preference?”

“Only that whatever you come up with fits the mood.” He smiled sadly. “Anyhow, JSC could use a new lawn ornament. The one we have now is getting a little rusty.”

“I understand,” she said sourly.

Lawn ornaments. Jesus.

She did understand. Hadamard wanted her to guide what was left of the Shuttle program through the current panic about the Chinese, all the way to the usual run-down and cancellations that would follow.

But, she thought, maybe it didn’t have to be like that.

If she took this job, she would move into a position where she could make things happen.

And there are, she thought, other possibilities than turning spaceships into lawn ornaments. Even if doing anything constructive would mean battling past the opposition of a lot of interests, not least the USAF. And even if it would all, it seemed, have to be a race against time, ensuring that whatever was set up was in place before Congressman Xavier Maclachlan became President and had a chance to shoot it in the head…

It was a hell of a challenge. But suddenly dreams like Rosenberg’s didn’t seem so remote. Suddenly she was in a position to move proposals like that out of the realms of thought experiments, even make them happen.

They emerged into the bright sunlight of the field beyond the wood. In the distance, the children continued to play, their calls rising to the sky.

For the first time since hitting the dirt at Edwards, she felt her pulse pick up a beat of excitement.

She said to Hadamard, “I’ll do the job.” But, she thought, maybe not the way you expect me to.

O
n Monday morning she
moved into her new office at JSC. She called in her secretary and asked him to set up a series of meetings. George, a somber but competent young man with his hair woven into tight plaits, took notes and began his work.

She needed a team. So she made a list for George: Marcus White, the stranded Moonwalker; Barbara Fahy, the woman who had tried to bring
Columbia
home; the young Station astronauts Mott and Libet; Bill Angel, the nearest thing to a competent pilot she knew. And Isaac Rosenberg, the dreamer, the crazy man who wanted to go to Titan.

George went off to set up meetings.

After a few minutes, she called him back in.

“Look, George, things are going to start popping around here,” she said. “I can’t tell you what it is right now, but I want you to keep a log of the people I talk to. And keep it in a secure directory.”

After all, she reflected, they could be making history here, in the next few weeks and months. Maybe historians of the future would care enough to understand how this decision had come about.

Or, she thought in her gloomier moments, not.

George seemed intrigued, but complied without questioning.

She got to work.

R
osenberg called Paula
from Hobby Airport, ten miles southeast of downtown Houston. His plane, from Pasadena, had landed a half-hour late, after four in the afternoon.

“Get a cab to JSC,” she told him. “I’ll pick you up in my car at security.”

Rosenberg hadn’t been out this way before. He stood waiting by the security gate on NASA Road One, staring with undisguised curiosity at the aging black-and-white buildings.

From JSC she drove east with the home-bound rush-hour traffic, further out from Houston, heading for Clear Lake.

Benacerraf said, “You ought to do the tourist bit, while you’re here. Space Center Houston. They’ve got a terrific Mars-walk immersive VR. I’m told.”

“I prefer RL.”

“RL?”

“You don’t get online much, do you?”

The road paralleled the north coast of Clear Lake, which was an inlet of Galveston Bay. They passed the glittering tower of the Nassau Bay Hilton, its glass walls coated with softscreen animated posters.

Rosenberg said, “We could be anywhere. Any coast area, anywhere. You wouldn’t think—”

“I know.” She stared at the shabby roadside buildings, the tough, scrub grass. “Erosion runs fast here,” she said. “And now that the space effort is receding—” and the wilder rumors now were that most of the NASA centers, JSC included, were to be mothballed “—all that erosion is going to have a field day. A hundred years from now, JSC will just be a cow pasture again.”

“But a cow pasture with immersive VR facilities.”

Benacerraf lived on Shorewood Drive, a small road that curved parallel to the shore of Taylor Lake, itself an inlet of Clear Lake. This was the smart residential community called El Lago. Rosenberg stared out the window, without commenting.

She tried to see the little community through his eyes. Home town America, circa 1961: garages and air-conditioners and bicycles and shining lawns, the houses neat and dark with hints of ranch style, or mock Tudor flourishes, or discreet Spanish designs. Uniformly ersatz. Even the trees were all the same age, she realized now.

Give it up, Benacerraf. He’s probably thinking how much he needs to pee. El Lago is a dormitory for the Space Age, planned and artificial, no more, no less.

They reached her home. There were tour other cars already parked in a ragged row along the side of the road: her other guests, arrived ahead of her, the rest of her team.

She observed Rosenberg sizing up the house.

It was a ranch house, an individually styled bungalow, wood framed with stone cladding. The trees, pine and fern, looked manicured. The lawn was luminous green in the last light of the sun, its little sprinkler heads glittering. At the back of the house was a small private jetty, with space for a couple of boats.

“Nice,” Rosenberg said neutrally.

She searched for her key. “Astronaut country, 1960s style. Nice if you come from Illinois. Or if you like the water.”

“And you don’t?”

She shrugged. “I prefer Seattle. And I don’t sail. Anyhow this is rental only.”

“Smart.”

“Yes. Property prices have been falling like crazy around here, ever since
Columbia.”

She fired the key’s infrared beam at the door, and it swung open with a soft hiss of hydraulics.

Benacerraf’s housekeeper, Kevin, had let the rest of her guests in. When Benacerraf and Rosenberg arrived, the housekeeper served them drinks and began to lay out dinner.

The guests were gathered in the gazebo. It was a new kind of conservatory, connected to the house by a flexible joint, and mounted on a platform. It rotated to follow the sun, flowerlike.

Rosenberg seemed to love it. “Bradbury,” he said.

“What?”

“Never mind. It’s just very appropriate.”

Everyone had turned up, Benacerraf noted with satisfaction: seven of them—Benacerraf herself with Rosenberg, Marcus White, Bill Angel, Barbara Fahy, and the two younger astronauts Benacerraf didn’t know so well, Siobhan Libet and Nicola Mott.

Marcus White grinned at Benacerraf. He was working through seven and sevens, and he looked oiled already. He grinned at Rosenberg, around a mouthful of peanuts, and the room’s candlelight caught the silvery stubble on his creased cheeks.

“So, Rosenberg. You’re the asshole who wants to go to Titan. Why the hell?”

Rosenberg didn’t seem awed; he looked back levelly, holding his drink up before him. “Suppose,” he said, “you tell me why y
ou
want to go.”

White snorted.

“He has a point, Marcus.” Benacerraf had already oulined the purpose of the dinner party “Rosenberg thinks Titan is El Dorado, a treasure house of exotic chemicals, even life. But what about you? You wouldn’t be here if you weren’t interested yourself.”

White looked fleetingly embarrassed. To cover, he shoveled more peanuts into his mouth. “What the hell,” he said, his lips shiny with grease. “If this comes off, it’s the first human flight beyond low Earth orbit since
Apollo I
7. And probably the last. Who wouldn’t want to go?”

“Then there’s your reason,” Bill Angel said. “Titan as Everest. We should go because it’s there. Why the hell not?” Benacerraf watched him drain his glass again, his hand like a claw on the frosted surface.

She didn’t need to ask why Angel was here. He had no choice. He would find it easier to climb Everest, to go to Titan, than to face himself, alone in a room, with no goals left. She’d seen it before, a dozen times, in the Astronaut Office. The blight of the co-pilot. At least Marcus had the wisdom to know himself. The stories were Angel had been doing a lot of drinking since the
Columbia
incident.

But, she thought, he was competent.

The younger astronauts, Libet and Mott, seemed embarrassed; they dropped their eyes and worked steadily on their drinks.

Barbara Fahy cleared her throat. “The way I figure nobody is going the hell anywhere, let alone Titan.” She looked around, at a circle of glum faces. “I mean it. It’s just unworkable.”

Benacerraf said mildly, “How so?”

Fahy said, “I’ve done some back-of-the-envelope figuring. How do you fly to Saturn? Saturn is ten times as far from the sun as Earth, remember. A Hohmann orbit, a minimum-energy transfer—which is all we could manage with chemical technology, which is all we got—would be a long, skinny ellipse touching Earth’s orbit at one extreme, and Saturn’s at the other. It would take six years to get there. Then you’d have to wait out a year at Saturn, until the planets got back into their correct alignment, and ride out the other hall of the ellipse, back home. Total mission time thirteen years. Now, what size crew are you talking about? Five, six? How the hell are you going to supply and sustain a crew for a thirteen-year mission—all of it isolated from Earth? Christ, the longest missions we’ve run in Earth orbit without resupply are only a couple of months—”

“ISRU,” said Siobhan Libet.

Fahy looked at her. “Huh?”

Rosenberg said, “She’s right. ln-situ resource utilization. You wouldn’t carry food for the Titan stopover. We’re landing, remember? There’s carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen down there. All sorts of organic and carbohydrate compounds.”

“So that gets you through the year stopover. Maybe you could even resupply for the journey home,” Fahy said. “But the main point still stands. You’d need to carry fuel to slow into Titan orbit. And all that fuel has to be hauled up and launched, in its turn, from an initial low Earth orbit. The numbers just multiply.

“I figure you’re looking at millions of pounds of fuel to be hauled up to low Earth orbit. And the cargo capacity of the Shuttle to LEO is only sixty-five thousand pounds. Are you seriously proposing thirty, forty Shuttle missions?”

“But you’d use gravity assists,” Nicola Mott said. “Wouldn’t you? Like
Cassini.
You wouldn’t follow a simple Hohmann trajectory You’d play the usual interplanetary pool: bounce off Earth, Venus, Jupiter maybe, and each time steal a little of their energy of rotation around the sun.”

“Fine,” said Angel thickly, “but if you’re talking about going in to Venus you’d have to carry sun-shields, and—”

“Details,” Marcus White said. “Fucking details. You always were a windy bastard, Angel.”

Angel grinned. He said, “Okay. But even if you cut your initial mass in LEO by, say, fifty percent, you’re still looking at dozens of Shuttle launches. And there’s no way Hadamard would back such a mission.”

Barbara Fahy sighed. “He’s right, I’m afraid.”

“No, he isn’t,” Isaac Rosenberg said. “You’re making the wrong assumptions.”

Angel said, “Huh?”

Rosenberg said mildly, “What it you don’t come home?”

There was a long silence.

Kevin, the housekeeper, called them to eat.

The meal was set up in small china dishes on candle-heated plate-warmers, all arranged on a big rotating serving platform on top of Benacerraf’s favorite piece of furniture, her walnut dining table. There was hot and sour soup, spare ribs, chicken in ginger, corn with spring onions, Szechuan prawns, and a variety of rice and noodle plates; there was water, beer and wine on the table.