Titan (49 page)

Sad little bastard, he thought bleakly.

Anyhow, what was Apollo but the apotheosis of all dens?

And what did that say about Isaac Rosenberg? By launching himself off on this endless spaceflight, was he braving a new frontier, or retreating to some cozy fantasy of his lonely childhood?

It was best, he had learned much earlier in this mission, to avoid self-analysis.

Sitting alone inside the quiet Apollo, he worked his way through his manuals, learning how the old spaceship was flown.

Benacerraf had instituted a weekly crew meeting.

They were facing so many problems now, she figured they couldn’t afford to indulge in their habitual acrimonious isolation from each other. They had to discuss their problems, come up with solutions, parcel out pieces of work.

Much as she hated the idea herself.

And so, now, the four of them hooked legs or arms around stanchions and struts, their postures taking on the stooping crouch of the neutral-G position.

They looked, Benacerraf thought, like four birds of prey, perched on some metal branch.

“… We traced the root cause of the heart arrhythmia problems,” Rosenberg was saying, reading from a softscreen which was suspended in the air before him. The computer folded softly like a bird’s wing, the letters and numbers shimmering across its surface. “It was a trace element deficiency.”

Benacerraf said, “What trace element?”

“Potassium. You find it in sea water and in various salts, like carnallite and sylvine. Potassium is essential in the biocycles. Its salts are used as fertilizers in the farm’s nutrient solution, which—”

“Cut to the chase, asshole,” Angel said mildly, his eyes closed.

Rosenberg said, “In the potable water we have a limit of three hundred forty milligrams per liter. We’ve actually been recording a level of a tenth that.” He scratched his face. “The problem is partly the excess peeing we all do. Potassium, along with other stuff, gets flushed out of the system. So it has to be replaced. Now I’m spiking the potable water with electrolytes, specifically potassium, to restore the balance.”

“So will we have long-term heart problems because of this?” Mott asked.

“Probably.” Rosenberg shrugged. “But this is not a regime in which we’re aiming for a long and healthy old age anyhow. I wouldn’t worry; it’s just another bogeyman to bite us, in a long line with all the others.”

Benacerraf found Rosenberg’s thin voice fantastically irritating, as he droned through his lists of facts. “So tell me what caused the deficiency in the biocycles.”

“It has to be the SCWO,” Rosenberg said, his eyes studiously on Benacerraf’s face.

Angel showed no reaction, his face hidden by his beard.

Rosenberg doesn’t want to take him on. So, Benacerraf thought wearily, it’s up to me to confront this asshole again, to take on the burden of responsibility for us all.

“Bill, the SCWO is your baby. We’ve been having problems with it for years. And now this potassium crap.”

Angel shrugged, his body moving minutely in the air as his center of mass shifted. “What do you want me to tell you? Look, we knew when we launched that the SCWO was immature technology, a risky piece of equipment to haul along. Basically the damn thing works. Hell,” he said, leering casually at Mott, who looked away, “you know that, or we’d all be knee-deep in Rosenberg’s pale shit, right? But we still get a lot of corrosion of the surfaces in there—it’s a hostile environment, and there are a shit-load of toxic gases which—”

“Bill, I’ve been relying on you to fix it. And now I hear this.”

“I’ve nursemaided the damn thing halfway to Saturn already,” Angel snapped. “I’m a pilot, not a plumber.”

“You have to get it
right,
Bill. Right to the last decimal place, of the last trace element. That’s what it takes.” She felt herself slipping into peevish anger. “Don’t you see that? Why should I have to tell you what to do, how to do it? Why can’t I trust you to do your job?…”

She noticed Mott folding her arms over herself, and rolling her eyes, escaping inward.

Damn it, she thought. We set ourselves the trap again. And I fell into it.

Angel was still blustering, justifying his negligent work on the SCWO. And Rosenberg, unfortunately, was going into lecture mode. He put his hands to his temples, his own long hair and wispy beard drifting around his face, and he started telling Angel stuff he already knew: about the instability of their miniature biosphere, the lack of buffering reservoirs of essential elements like potassium, the way the balance had to be monitored and adjusted constandy by the crew…

Angel started yelling back at Rosenberg, who just closed his eyes and droned on. Their voices seemed amplified in the dingy metal tube of the hab module.

Benacerraf knew she needed to find some way of defusing the situation. But, she thought wearily, why me? Why is it always me who has to be the peacemaker, to eat shit, to make Bill calm down and force Rosenberg to look up from his softscreen and dry Nicola’s eyes over her girlfriend—
why me?

The meeting broke up, acrimoniously, with no real outcome. Mott went to her sleep compartment, Rosenberg to the farm.

And Angel…

Benacerraf watched, discreetly, as Angel took up position near the water spigots of the galley. And, with his skinny, spindled legs folded under him, he started to play with water. Angel took a syringe now, for example, and filled it with water from a spigot. When he pressed the plunger, slowly and carefully, injecting water into the air, a small bubble grew from the needle’s tip. He jerked the needle away and the water took the form of a tiny planet, floating in the air. Angel worked his needle and produced a whole set of the little water globes, drifting in the air around his head.

Then he took smaller syringes from a set he’d improvised from medical waste, and injected the bubbles with iodine, grape juice, diluted orange juice, to stain them blue, green, yellow, red. Soon he had a whole Solar System, Benacerraf thought, with a miniature Mars and Earth and Jupiter, floating around his bearded head as if around a sun. Angel’s eyes followed the little spheres, entranced.

Now Angel tried to herd his little water planets together, with his open palms. The water spheres were clammy to the touch; if Angel was gentle they bounced away from his palm as if coated with some fine elastic membrane, but if he wasn’t so careful the balls of water would cling like some jellyfish, spreading over the surface of his palm. With one such glob dangling from his palm, he shook his hand gently, up and down; the spherical cap rippled symmetrically, clinging to his skin.

In microgravity, water’s surface tension became dominant, and tried to haul it constantly into the shape of a sphere. But with a little ingenuity a lot of bizarre shapes could be conjured out of this most basic of materials. And it fascinated Bill Angel.

Angel spent hours turned in on himself like this, with his syringes and lathes and bizarre, oscillating shapes. And as he stared into the shimmering meniscus of some new sphere or torus, he seemed, to Benacerraf, to be peering into some world of his own, a private place the others couldn’t share, a place he could escape to, as if the water forms were projections of his own mind.

Rosenberg had his own theory about Bill. So he’d told her privately. He thought Bill was aging too quickly. There were studies that showed how cosmic rays caused irreversible damage to nervous tissue. For instance, the response of nerve cells to muscarinic neurotransmitters, which helped muscle-controlling neurons communicate, deteriorated. Maybe this was happening to Bill, Rosenberg speculated. Maybe space was turning him into a decrepit old man, before their eyes.

She suspected Bill had gotten wind of this, in fact. He had taken to sleeping at one end of the hab module, surrounded by big batteries with lots of nickel and cadmium, which gave him good shielding. But it was probably too late.

Benacerraf was no expert on abnormal states of the mind. But she hadn’t tried to discuss this with Mission Control. She wasn’t sure who would be listening any more anyhow. And on a planet where local wars were flaring over water management problems, the image of gaunt Americans playing head games with the wet stuff on some dumb Buck Rogers mission halfway to Saturn would not play well with the public.

On and on Angel fiddled, while
Discovery
, cradling its little nest of light and warmth, sailed further from the sun.

A
round the U.S. carrier
Independence
, the Pacific stretched to the horizon, as flat and still and steel-gray as the deck of the carrier itself, its sluggish waves reflecting the cobalt blue of the cloudless sky. Even the rest of the battle group was out of sight, over the horizon.

The sun was low, the light harsh, and Gareth Deeke was grateful for his cap and sunglasses.

A single aircraft stood ready on the deck: a McDonnell-Douglas F-28, its slim form sixty feet long, its delta wings all but obscured by the snaking hoses of the fueling tankers—kerosene and hydrogen peroxide—which surrounded it. The F-28’s thermal shield, plated over its upper hull, gleamed white as snow in the Pacific sunlight.

The F-28 was Deeke’s aircraft.

The
Independence
was four hundred miles from the Chinese coast, and two hundred miles from Taiwan, to the southeast of the island. And it was a matter of hours—less, perhaps—from the initiation of a U.S.-China war. But, suspended in this instant of calm, the ship could have been anywhere, Gareth Deeke reflected, anywhere on the surface of this watery planet; and it could have been transported to almost any time in the last half billion years.

He was pretty much alone up here, save for the service techs. He’d been here for a time, but he wasn’t bored. He was standing on alert. He had stood on alert many times before, in his long career.

He had a choice of being up here or going down below, to sit with the other pilots and chew on pizza and mixed vegetables and watch softscreen CNN reports on the progress of the Chinese preparation for invasion.

His preference was clear.

Besides, he didn’t exactly mix easily with the others. They respected his ability and experience, but most of the guys, with one eye on their own careers, shied away from a man with a past as tainted and complex as Deeke’s.

It didn’t trouble him. At least, not away from the cramped confines of his quarters, where he had too much time to think. He wasn’t troubled by anything here: up on the flight deck, in the salt air.

A shadow flickered across the deck. Deeke looked up.

It was a Condor, an unmanned surveillance plane built by Boeing. The Condor was a light, subsonic craft with a single turbofan engine. It was big, with the wing span of a 747, and it could hover at sixty thousand feet for a week without replenishment, scanning the ground with high-resolution radar and electro-optic sensors. Condors—and their smaller cousins the Dark-Stars—had become a common sight in areas of tension like this, wheeling through the air like expectant birds of prey…

There was a low beeping.

He lifted his wrist. A softscreen patch on the back of his hand was scrolling with symbols.

The Chinese ships were leaving harbor. It had started. Deeke grinned.

He turned on his heel and headed for the personal gear room.

The hot war had started two weeks ago; Deeke had followed it closely, expecting his call.

Taiwan’s president, after his latest reelection, at last came out openly in favor of a declaration of formal independence from Beijing. China responded immediately, and the Taipei stock market hit the floor.

It took three days for Beijing to assemble a hundred thousand troops in the embarkation ports in the provinces of Zhejiang, Fujian and Guangdong. Taiwan put its armed forces on their highest level of alert and mobilized its reserves, and asked the U.S. for arms shipments under the Taiwan Relations Act.

The next day, Taiwan naval patrols in the Strait had been fired on by Chinese “fishing boats.” They returned fire, and China proclaimed that a “hostile act against ordinary Chinese people.” In response, China announced a naval blockade of all the tankers ferrying oil to Taiwan.

Air battles started over Taiwan, mass flights of ancient Chinese Russian-built Sukhois against Taiwan’s more modern Western-built F-16s and Mirage 2000-5s. The technology was a mismatch, but the numbers were telling: after a couple of days China had achieved a tentative control of the air over the Strait.

The Great Helmsman himself had appeared in Tiananmen Square to announce that if Taiwan didn’t capitulate, the invasion would begin.

Maclachlan responded by saying that an invasion of Taiwan would amount to a declaration of war with America. And besides, China’s control of the Strait didn’t amount to a hill of beans, said Maclachlan; not with the U.S. carriers, and F-15s in Okinawa, ready to join the action.

Anyhow it didn’t seem likely the Chinese could secure a beachhead, even without the U.S. coming to the aid of Taiwan. And a failed invasion could cost fifty percent casualties.

But the Chinese had nukes, and ICBMs. They could simply wipe Taiwan off the face of the Earth.