Titan (36 page)

The voyage of
Discovery
was becoming, she thought, a clinching argument against humans in space, for science purposes.

Anyhow, the truth was that the science stuff had essentially been tacked on to give them all something meaningful to do, while their twenty-six-hundred-day mission wound through its dull course. Nobody on Earth was waiting with bated breath for
Discovery’
s dazzling streams of data.

Exercise time.

She pulled herself through a hatch into the docking node at the aft end of the hab module. Then, another hatch above her head led into the centrifuge cabin. This was a cylinder, only just big enough to hold a single human standing upright, its walls cluttered with equipment and punctured by small round portholes. It was fixed to a robot arm, derived from the Shuttle’s old remote manipulator system.

When she had sealed up the hatch behind her and given the cabin’s rudimentary systems a check-out, the cabin detached from the docking node and the arm swung it out and away from the body of the orbiter.

The arm began to pull the cabin through a circle, twenty-five yards in diameter. The cabin creaked, a little ominously, as the arm picked up speed, and she could feel the metallic swaying of the stiff arm as it spun up.

When it got up to speed the cabin would swing around, like a bucket on a rope, at the best part of six revolutions a minute. That would give her an illusion of gravity, generated by centripetal acceleration, of the best part of a G.

She peered out the windows.

Benacerraf was orbiting in a plane a few feet above the orbiter’s payload bay, with its shining insulation blankets, its complex shadows, the empty blackness of space beyond.

As the centrifuge picked up speed, the Universe started to wheel around her, so she closed up the windows, pulling down compact little aluminum blinds. Enclosed, she could feel her feet pressing more firmly against the floor. There were handrails here, painted green, and she hung onto them now.

Experimentally, she moved her head, this way and that. Immediately, waves of nausea and giddiness swept over her.

The trouble was, this wasn’t true gravity, but centripetal acceleration induced by the spin. There was also Coriolis force, the sideways push that produced weather patterns on the rotating Earth It was fine as long as she didn’t move. But if she moved her head in the direction of the spin, Coriolis pushed back with a force of a fifth of a G. And if she moved it in the opposite direction, her head felt lighter by the same amount. If she were to try to climb up, the Coriolis would push her sideways. And so on.

There were other problems, too. There was a variation, like a tide, of the size of the force along the length of her body; her head was a good deal closer to the axis of spin than her feet. The centrifuge’s arm couldn’t have been much shorter than it was, or that difference would rise above a few percent, and cause damaging hydrostatic pressure differences in her tissues.

There were two fold-up exercise devices in here, a cycle ergometer and a treadmill, both folded away against the wall. Moving carefully, she reached down now and pulled out the bike.

The fake gravity was still so low that she had some trouble starting; her pedal motions tended to lift her off her seat. She had brought a pillow which she braced now against the ceiling of the cabin, and wedged herself in place with her head. She held tightly to the handlebars. Her feet were in pedal straps, so she could pull down with one pedal while pushing with the other, and that helped keep her in place.

Nobody had run a mission in microgravity much beyond a few hundred days. Nobody knew for sure what the impact of very long term exposure to microgravity would be, or if any of the countermeasures they were taking would work. And nobody had tried to live for years under one-seventh G, as they would have to on Titan. The surgeons didn’t know if that was even survivable. For sure, the crew had to expect a long-term loss of bone mass of maybe a quarter, even after they had reached Titan.

Exercise, which would help combat the other damaging microgravity deconditioning processes—muscle atrophy, bone marrow loss, reduction in T-lymphocytes—was no use with the real showstopper, the cumulative loss of bone calcium. And although the crew would be treated with osteogenic drugs—and there was hopeful talk, which had so far come to nothing, of finding ways to stimulate bone growth with electromagnetic fields—the surgeons on the ground had agreed that the only practical solution was to remove the cause: to restore the crew, periodically, to gravity.

So this centrifuge had been improvised. Every crew member was supposed to work out in here, in conditions of nearly a G, for several hours a day.

She didn’t really object to the exercising, uncomfortable as it was. Unlike some of the others. It got a lot of the stiffness out of her underused muscles, especially her legs. It was as if her body had an agenda of its own, every now and again demanding that she give it some work to do. And she enjoyed the glow of rude health she experienced after a tough work-out.

It made her look better, too—more like herself—because the extra flow of blood to her legs reduced the puffiness around her eyes.

Anyhow, she thought, it was better than rickets.

And she enjoyed the privacy of this snug, enclosed little bay, the isolation from the others.

As she worked, she thought about her crew.

Rosenberg seemed relatively content with his restricted life: pursuing his own research, bitching at the others when some disturbance wrecked one of his careful experiments. But he was drawing inward, she thought.

So, too, was Nicola Mott. Mott seemed moody, perhaps depressive, ground down already—despite her experience on Station—by the dullness of the interplanetary trajectory, without even the glowing skin of Earth sliding past the windows as a distraction.

But Siobhan Libet, who of all of them was closest to Mott, seemed to be hanging on to her cheerfulness—her sense of wonder—longer than the rest, and she seemed to be doing a good job of keeping Mott back from whatever abyss of depression was threatening her.

Then there was Bill Angel: tough, competent, but restless—a pilot, Benacerraf thought, without any piloting to do, for two thousand days. Of all of them it was Angel who had most rebelled against their daily regime, bitching at the others and Mission Control in Houston. He was a monkey rattling the bars of his cage.

And as for herself, Benacerraf tried to avoid too much introversion, as she had throughout her life. She, like Angel, felt the chafing frustration of being stuck in here with nothing meaningful to do.

Early in the mission, during the euphoria that had followed their hair-raising launch and injection onto this long interplanetary trajectory—and the delight of becoming the first humans to leave cislunar space—they had all been a lot more sociable with each other. They had made a point, for example, of planning meal times to be together.

But that had worn off as soon as the dull daily slog of the mission unfolded.

She’d read of Antarctic scientists who, after a winter snowed into their huts, would throw open the doors as soon as spring came, and just walk off, heading so far into the distance, away from each other, that they might disappear over the horizon.

The crew of
Discovery,
in their space-going shack, faced a winter that would last six long years. As far as Benacerraf was concerned, anything that they found to help them all endure that and keep from driving each other crazy, like fragments of privacy and broken-up shift patterns, was fine by her.

She pressed her eye to the coelostat eyepiece. The coelostat, an old British invention, was an arrangement of spinning mirrors that compensated for the whirl of the centrifuge, and the barbecue roll of
Discovery,
to deliver a reasonably steady telescopic view.

She had the coelostat centered on Earth and Moon. The image was slightly blurred, and prone to drift.

Discovery’s
trajectory was a complicated double orbit around the sun, in which she would complete two passes past Venus, and then a final close approach to Earth, coming within a few hundred miles of the surface, achieving powerful gravity assists each time.

Only then, after two years, having accumulated the velocity its chemical rockets could not impart, would
Discovery
leave the inner Solar System behind, and be hurled towards Jupiter—for a further assist—and on to Saturn.

Thus, right now,
Discovery
was spiraling in towards the sun, on its way to the first rendezvous with Venus. But the energy provided by its injection burn was so low that the ship’s orbit was pretty much tracking that of Earth around the sun, drawing almost imperceptibly away from the home world, in towards the solar fire. So even now, after eighty days, Earth and Moon showed fat, gibbous discs, their faces turned in parallel to the sun. The blue-white of Earth was much brighter, almost overwhelming the faint brown sheen of its smaller companion.

Benacerraf could still study Earth. She was looking at the area from Tibet across Mongolia: northern China and the Gobi desert, one of the bleakest, most barren parts of the planet.

Her perspective was evolving, as Earth receded.

She’d tried to follow, even participate in, the inquisitions that had followed the
Endeavour
launch. The country had gone into a kind of weary agony when it had been discovered that the X-15 operation had been mounted by a rogue USAF faction, and heads were rolling. There seemed to be a mood of sourness among the public, engendered by the X-15 incident, as if NASA and the USAF were all of a piece. And besides—as Jackie had predicted—the public had rapidly grown bored with the unchanging news from space.

Xavier Maclachlan was growing ever stronger, his lead in the polls consolidating. Jake Hadamard was already fighting a rearguard action to maintain the RLV and other programs he had started, in the wake of the
Columbia
crash.

It became steadily harder to believe that there would ever be a meaningful attempt at a retrieval.

But it was too late to turn back. Benacerraf had committed herself to traversing this long dark tunnel, leading only to the frigid wastes of Titan. And she suspected she’d always known in her heart of hearts it would turn out this way.

But it grew harder to care, as the radio voices grew fainter, buzzing like wasps in a jar. Even Jackie’s irregular, begrudged messages seemed to be losing their power to hurt her.

Earth was irrelevant, now; America was simply the crucible within which this mission had been forged. She was glad to leave it all behind, she was deciding; in many ways she preferred her new life here, cooped up in this handful of dimly lit, sour-smelling compartments, the confines of the ship her only reality, the cool logic of Newton’s laws her only constraint.

After a time, she pushed away the coelostat eyepiece.

She cycled for her regulation four hours.

Discovery
was moving at a little more than Earth’s escape velocity, seven miles a second. So, Benacerraf figured, while she had been cycling
Discovery
had crossed around a hundred thousand miles: nearly half the distance between Earth and Moon. It would be something to radio back to her grandsons.

With a shuddering whir, the centrifuge began to slow. Soon, the cabin had snuggled against the docking node.

The day eroded to its close.

Her sleeping restraint was just a bag fastened against the wall of her quarters, her little rounded-door compartment on the starboard side of the hab module. Sometimes she was cold, because the sleep compartments were ventilated to the point of being draughty. There wasn’t much choice about that, because otherwise, in the absence of convection, she could suffocate in the lingering carbon dioxide of her own breath. But at first she’d found the ventilation stream was blowing up into her face, into her mouth and nose, making her feel chilled to the bone. So, defying the local vertical, she’d turned her sleeping bag around. But now the draught tended to blow up into her sleeping bag, making it billow around her, and dissipating the warmth generated by her body…

Besides, the hab module was full of noise.

She wasn’t disturbed by the whine of the pumps and fans of the air conditioning system. That was a comforting, surrounding susurrus. But as the sun approached, the heat made
Discovery
expand and contract, popping and banging like a tin roof. And whenever
Discovery’s
RCS thrusters fired, making some automated tweak to the trajectory, it sounded like machine gun fire.

She’d adapt, she expected. She had, after all, two and a half thousand days to get used to this.

To unwind, she read her book.

It was science fiction, a lightweight paperback. There were whole libraries stored on CD-ROM, of course, but she’d never gotten used to reading online, even on softscreens. She’d brought this book, and a handful of others, along with her in her Personal Preference Kit.

(… Actually the books had had to be tested for their flammability; she’d had to give up a couple of her precious old paperbacks, to let engineers at JSC set fire to them. Oddly, books didn’t burn so well. The engineers called them ablators. Each page had to be on fire before the next inward reached its scorching point, and so the books would protect themselves, shedding heat by discarding pages, like a spacecraft entering an atmosphere…)

The book was
2001: A Space Odyssey
by Arthur Clarke, a yellowing paperback from 1971. She wasn’t a sci-fi buff, but this book had always been a favorite.

It charmed her that this wonderful old book also featured another ship called
Discovery
, heading for the moons of Saturn. But Clarke’s nuclear-powered
Discovery
was all of four hundred feet long, and in its pressure hull, a spacious hall thirty-five feet across, a carousel rotated fast enough to simulate lunar gravity. (Too small, she thought wistfully; Poole and Bowman would have been knocked sideways by Coriolis, and spent their lives throwing up.)

The truth was, she thought sadly, 2001 had come and gone, and the book, like the work of Wells and Verne before, had mutated into a period-piece, a description of a lost alternate world. But at least, she thought, she had been spared Hal.