Titan (6 page)

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Authors: Ben Bova

BOOK: Titan
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Then she sat up straighter and smiled. Manny Gaeta! He went into the rings once. Maybe he’ll do it again—not as a stunt this time, but as a scientific expedition.
T
he computations of time that humans use meant nothing on the cloud-shrouded shore of the frozen sea.
Titan Alpha
sat where it had landed, unmoving, uncommunicative. But not inert.
Its sensors were making measurements. Outside temperature-181 degrees Celsius. Atmospheric pressure 1,734 millibars. Atmospheric composition: nitrogen, methane, ethane, minor hydrocarbons and nitrogen compounds. Tactile pads in its treads reported on the tensile strength of the spongy ground. Infrared cameras swept across the landscape, recording the black snow that was sifting down from the dirty-orange clouds slithering sluggishly across the sky.
Titan Alpha
’s internal logic circuits concluded that the broad expanse of dark and flat material down at the base of the bluffs must be an ice-crusted liquid of some sort. Microwave radar detected waves surging sluggishly beneath the crust, making it heave and crack. A sea. Priorities built into the central computer’s master program demanded that the sea’s composition be investigated.
Titan Alpha
fired a microsecond burst of ten megajoules from the laser mounted in the swivel turret on its roof. The mass spectrometer identified a host of chemical compounds in the ice evaporated by the
laser: water ice mostly, but lots of methane and other hydrocarbons as well.
The command protocol built into the communications system called for transmitting these data through the main uplink antenna. But a subroutine in the computer’s master program prevented this. No communications outside. Store the data but do not communicate. Wait. Observe and wait.
“It’s what we call engineer’s hell,” said one of the engineers who had helped to design and build
Titan Alpha.
“Everything checks but nothing works.”
Urbain sat at the head of the conference table, outwardly calm and under control. Only the slight tic beneath his right eye betrayed the tension within him.
His eight lead engineers sat around the oval conference table. One of the conference room’s smart walls displayed schematics of
Titan Alpha
’s various systems: propulsion, electrical power, sensors, communications and more. Urbain had not invited his scientists to this meeting; the problem with
Titan Alpha
was one of engineering. Something had malfunctioned and it was up to his engineering staff to determine what had gone wrong and to fix it. Besides, the scientists would swamp the meeting with bright ideas they hatched on the spur of the moment and drive everyone to distraction.
He was surprised and annoyed, then, when the young woman who was supposed to be monitoring the satellite hovering over
Titan Alpha
’s landing site burst into the conference room.
“It fired the laser!” she fairly shouted without preamble or even asking pardon for interrupting the meeting. “Squirted off a shot into the Lazy H Sea.”
Urbain jumped to his feet. “Are you certain?”
“Got it on vid,” she said excitedly.
Without bothering to adjourn the meeting, Urbain raced for the door and down the corridor toward the control center, followed by all eight of the engineers.
The control center was much quieter than two days earlier. Wexler and the other VIPs were preparing to leave
Goddard
and head back to Earth. Urbain desperately wanted to have some results from
Titan Alpha
before they left.
The young scientist slipped into the chair of her console and clapped her headset on. She spoke briefly into the pin-sized microphone at her lips and her display screen lit up.
Urbain had placed an observation satellite in synchronous orbit above the site of the landing, a feat that was not as easy as he’d first thought it would be. Synchronous orbit for a body revolving as slowly as Titan was hundreds of thousands of kilometers above the moon’s surface. And although the satellite included a two-kilometer-long tether system that was designed to generate electrical power for its internal systems and maintain itself in proper position, unexpected bursts of electromagnetic energy from Saturn had incapacitated the tether, making it necessary to use positioning thrusters to keep the satellite in place. Constantly perturbed by the gravitational pulls of mammoth Saturn and its rings, the satellite devoured station-keeping fuel ravenously to maintain itself in its proper position; Urbain had already been forced to schedule a refueling mission.
Standing behind the seated woman, he bent over her shoulder and stared at the display screen: nothing more than a mottled sphere of dull orange. “Where is the infrared view?” he demanded impatiently.
The young woman held up a finger as she muttered into her mike. The sphere on the screen abruptly changed. The clouds disappeared and Urbain could see the bright glints of Titan’s rolling, hilly ground and the dark shapes of its seas. One looked like the head of a dragon, another somewhat like a child’s drawing of a dog. Then there was the H-shaped one, where
Titan Alpha
had landed.
“Magnification,” he snapped.
The view zoomed in. The H shape of the methane sea was oriented east-west, rather than standing up as the letter is made in actual writing. Nearly a century earlier the Americans, with their usual cowboy attitude, had dubbed it the Lazy H Sea.
“That’s the best magnification we can get,” said the scientist.
Urbain could not see his lander. We need satellites in lower orbits, he told himself. An entire fleet of them so that
Titan Alpha
is under constant surveillance.
“So?” he insisted. “Where is this laser flash?”
“I’m running it back—there! Didja see it? I’ll run it forward again.”
Urbain saw the briefest of glints on the edge of the methane sea. He straightened up, disappointed. “It might have been a sparkle in the electronics. A bad pixel.”
The young woman shook her head stubbornly. “No, I checked its duration and it’s consistent with a laser pulse. Just a small squirt, no more than ten kilojoules. Ran the light through a spectral analysis, too, and it’s water and methane and the other carbon gunk from the sea.”
Urbain stared down at her.
“Titan Alpha
actually fired its laser?”
“Yes, sir, it surely did.”
One of the engineers said, “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you, Dr. Urbain. We’re still getting telemetry from the lander. It’s sending up continuous data on its internal condition. Everything’s working fine.”
“But it will not uplink data from its sensors.”
“That’s the one glitch,” the engineer admitted.
Urbain glared at him. “This glitch, as you put it, makes
Titan Alpha
useless, pointless, stupid.”
Returning his glare without blinking, the engineer insisted, “I think it’s the central computer. Some kind of error in the programming. Everything is fine in the lander except for the data uplink. For some reason it’s not sending data back to us. The sensors seem to be working as designed, but the vehicle isn’t uplinking the data it’s collecting. It’s got to be a computer glitch.”
“In other words,” Urbain said coldly, “you are telling me that the patient is in fine condition, except that she is catatonic.”
K
ris Cardenas could see the tremendous strain that Urbain was under. As the only Nobel laureate in the habitat, she had invited Dr. Wexler, Pancho, Urbain and his wife to a small farewell dinner at Nemo’s restaurant, the swankiest eatery aboard
Goddard.
Nemo’s was decorated to look like the mock-Victorian interior of Jules Verne’s fictional
Nautilus
: Brass bulkheads and thick pipes running overhead. Display screens shaped like portholes showed teeming schools of fish, slithering octopuses, sleek deadly sharks.
Manny Gaeta looked uncomfortable in a maroon turtleneck shirt and ivory cardigan jacket, as close as he would come to formal dinner wear. Cardenas wore a flowered short-skirted frock, Wexler a dark blue finger-length tunic over a midcalf skirt. Pancho was in a comfortable pantsuit of hunter green, while Jeanmarie Urbain had decked herself in a clinging black sheath decorated with intricate embroidery that showed her trim figure to excellent advantage.
“I had hoped that this would be a celebration,” Cardenas said, trying to make her tone light, cheerful, “with champagne and congratulations. I guess that will have to wait for a while.”
Urbain opened his mouth to respond, then simply shook his head and reached for the glass of fruit juice in front of him.
“The celebration will come,” said Wexler, forcing a smile. “It’s too bad I won’t be here when the probe finally starts sending up data.”
“You leave tomorrow?” asked Jeanmarie. “So soon?”
“Ms. Lane’s craft departs tomorrow and there won’t be another ship out here for many months,” Wexler replied.
“I could hold it here for a coupla more days,” Pancho said. “But the bean counters back at Astro Corporation’s headquarters would get twitchy.”
“Tell ’em to twitch,” Gaeta gruffed.
Pancho grinned at him. “If I was still CEO I could and I would. With me retired, though, they’re doin’ me a favor as it is.”
“I couldn’t stay a few more days in any event,” said Wexler, glancing at Urbain and then swiftly back to Pancho. “I’ve got work piling up back home.”
“You think you’ll be able to fix the glitch in a few days?” Pancho asked Urbain.
He forced a sickly smile. “Perhaps.”
“It should take not much longer than that,” Jeanmarie said, quite firmly. “After all, they know the machine is working. Its internal systems are functioning. The only problem is the communications link, is it not?”
Urbain nodded morosely.
A human waiter came to the table hesitantly, holding large leather-covered menus. Cardenas nodded to him. Better to have them reading the menu and ordering their dinners than moping over the probe’s silence, she thought.
Although she was the oldest person at the table, Kris Cardenas looked like a vibrant outdoorsy woman in her thirties, thanks to the nanomachines that coursed through her body like a purposeful, almost intelligent immune system that destroyed invading microbes, cleared blood vessels of plaque, repaired damaged tissues. She had the broad shoulders and bright blonde hair of a California surfer, and cornflower blue eyes that sparkled in the candlelight of the dinner table. Exiled from Earth because of the nanos inside her, she had lost her husband, her children, had never touched the faces of her grandchildren. She had spent years in bitter hatred of the know-nothings on Earth who had totally banned nanotechnology, then more years of repentance as a medic for the rock rats of the Asteroid Belt at Ceres.
Now she was beginning a new life aboard this habitat orbiting Saturn, with handsome, hunky Manuel Gaeta, who had retired from his career as a stuntman to be with her.
As their appetizers were being placed on the table before them, Gaeta asked Urbain, “Do you have any idea why the beast won’t talk to you?”
Urbain, sitting across the table from Gaeta, raised his brows as he tried to interpret the man’s question. Finally he frowned slightly and said, “We are working on several possibilities. It is very puzzling.”
Wexler laid a clawlike hand on Urbain’s sleeve. “It’s always very puzzling, Eduoard, until you get the answer. Then you wonder why it puzzled you for so long.”
“I’m sure Eduoard will come up with the correct answer in a day or so,” said Jeanmarie.
Her husband scowled at her.
“You remember the first time we met?” Gaeta asked him. “In Professor Wilmot’s office?”
Urbain nodded warily.
A crooked grin broke out on Gaeta’s rugged face. “I wanted to go down to the surface of Titan. Be the first human being to set foot on the place. I thought you’d have a stroke!”
Smiling weakly, Urbain said, “We cannot have humans on Titan. The contamination …” He let his voice fade away.
“I agree,” said Wexler sharply. “There are unique life-forms down there. It would be criminal to contaminate them with terrestrial organisms.”
Gaeta raised his hands in a mock surrender. “Hey, I’m retired. I got no interest in doing stunts anymore.”
But Pancho arched a brow. “Y’know, maybe what your lander needs is a repairman. Or woman.”
“You volunteering?” Gaeta kidded her.
“I was an astronaut, ’way back when. I’ve fixed more’n one balky robot in orbit. I remember once, before Moonbase became the nation of Selene …”
Pancho regaled the table for the next hour and more with tales of her exploits on the Moon.
Meanwhile, Professor James Colraine Wilmot was entertaining an unwelcome guest in his quarters.
“I’m sorry to have interrupted your evening,” said Eberly, as he stepped into the professor’s sitting room.
“Yes, obviously,” Wilmot said with barely-concealed distaste.
Wilmot’s two-room suite was no larger than the standard apartments in the village of Athens: a sitting room and a bedroom, spacious by the standards of a spacecraft, yet as compact as an efficiency apartment in a major Earthside metropolis. It was as comfortable and unpretentious as Wilmot himself, though. The professor had furnished it just like his old digs in Cambridge; indeed, most of the warm, dark wooden furniture had been taken from his home there. He even had a section of one of the smart walls displaying a fireplace, complete with hypnotic crackling flames.
Wilmot himself was obviously dressed for an evening alone. He wore a deep burgundy dressing gown over rumpled, baggy tweed trousers. His feet were shod in comfortable old slippers. He was considerably bulkier than Eberly, a tall, thickset man with a bushy gray moustache and iron-gray hair, his face seamed and permanently tanned by long years in the field on anthropological expeditions.
Eberly was in his office attire: a light blue hip-length tunic over crisply creased charcoal slacks. Wilmot thought the tunic hid the man’s potbelly well. Strange creature, the professor said to himself, as he gestured Eberly to a worn old leather armchair. The man has obviously spent a great deal of effort to make his face look handsome, even commanding. Yet below the neck he’s soft as putty.
“To what do I owe the honor of this visit?” Wilmot asked, sinking into his favorite chair. A half-empty glass of whisky sat on the coffee table between them. Wilmot did not so much as glance at it, nor did he offer his visitor a drink.
Eberly’s sculpted face grew serious, almost grave. “I thought it best to discuss this face-to-face, and not in my office,” he began.
There he goes, thought Wilmot. Always some dire emergency. Always the need for secrecy. The man’s a born schemer.
“Some sort of problem?” he asked.
Nodding, Eberly said, “We need to amend the constitution.”
“Do we?”
“Yes. I can see now that calling for elections every year was a mistake. We need to change that.”
“Ah.” Wilmot smiled knowingly. “Now that you are in power you don’t want to run the risk of being voted out.”
“It’s not that,” Eberly protested.
“Then what?”
Eberly’s face twisted into a nervous grimace. Wilmot could see the wheels turning in his mind.
At last the younger man said, “Having elections every year means that whoever is in office must prepare for the coming election campaign. Every year! It distracts from his duties. I’m so busy trying to convince people I’m doing the best possible job for them that I don’t have the time to do the job they elected me to do.”
Wilmot considered this for a moment. “You could step down and allow someone else to take the job.”
“But I’m the best qualified!” Eberly cried. “I really am. You know the people of this habitat. They’re lazy. They don’t want the responsibilities of office. They’d rather let someone else do it.”
“They are averse to political responsibilities, true enough,” Wilmot admitted. “Perhaps we should institute a draft—”
“A draft?”
“It’s been suggested, you know. Pick our administrative officers by lot. Let the personnel department’s computer run the show. It might even generate some enthusiasm among the people, a lottery.”
“And whoever got picked would refuse to serve,” Eberly said, almost sullenly.
Wilmot realized he was tired of this tomfoolery. Besides, his drink was waiting for him. He rose to his feet. Eberly looked surprised, then slowly got up out of his chair.
“The real reason we have elections every year,” he said, gripping Eberly’s thin arm in one strong hand, “is to allow the people of this habitat to vent some political steam. Elections are a safety valve, you see. They give people the illusion that they have some degree of control over their government. Without elections, who knows what kind of protests and outright rebellions we might get—even from these lazy, noninvolved citizens. They’re slackers and noncomformists, no doubt, but if they feel the government is not sensitive to their needs, they
will hunt for a way to change the government. Elections are better than revolts.”
Eberly stood there, looking decidedly unhappy. He’s trying to think of a rebuttal, Wilmot could see. I can smell the wood burning.
“I doubt that you have anything to worry about, my boy,” Wilmot said jovially, clapping Eberly on the shoulder and steering him to the door. “As you say, the good citizens of this habitat are woefully apathetic. Most of ’em don’t even bother to vote—as long as there are elections. But take away the elections and you’ll have trouble on your hands. Remember, as the incumbent, you have a powerful advantage. I doubt that you have anything to fear. Really I do.”
Eberly looked far from reassured as he said good night and Wilmot closed the door on him.
Damned schemer, Wilmot thought, as he headed back to his drink. Blackmailer. He’d do anything to hold on to power.
He sat heavily and took a long sip of the whisky. Feeling its warmth working its way through him, Wilmot relaxed somewhat. I’m out of it, he said to himself. I’m merely an observer now, nothing more.
He took another sip, then leaned his head back. It’s damned interesting, though. Ten thousand men and women locked inside this oversized sardine tin. The ideal anthropological experiment. Despite it all, I’m quite a lucky man.
Eberly, meanwhile, was walking along the corridor to his own apartment. There were plenty of people coming up in the other direction. Eberly was surprised to see that most of them looked tanned, even golden. What is this? he asked himself. A new fad that I haven’t caught onto?
Everyone who passed him recognized Eberly, of course, and greeted him with smiles and hellos. That made him feel better. They know me. They like me. They even admire me, most of them.
Wilmot’s not going to offer any support for amending the constitution, he realized. But then he brightened. Still and all, the old man won’t offer any opposition, either. His moral power in this habitat is nil. I’ve seen to that.
He quickened his stride as he headed for his apartment.

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