Titan

BOOK FOUR Ground Truth A.D. 2014 — A.D. 2015

Voyager One flew high above the plane of the ecliptic, that invisible sheet in space which contains the orbits of the major planets of the Solar System.

Voyager was a spindly dragonfly construction, of booms and struts and instrument platforms, and a huge antenna which pointed back at Earth. Built around a compact ten-sided box, it weighed about a ton, and was big enough to fill a small house.

During its long mission, it had visited both the Solar System’s largest planets, Jupiter and Saturn. The gravitational fields of those worlds had flung Voyager onwards at such a high speed that it had broken the bonds which once tied it to the sun.

Now, Voyager One was racing across space at a million miles per day, heading for the stars.

But in the year 2014, an expected command from Earth did not arrive.

Voyager had been designed to operate during an extended lifetime and at a great distance from Earth, with an hours-long downlink-uplink communications round-trip time. Since contact with the ground would not be continuous, the spacecraft could know if it had lost contact with Earth only if it missed an expected command. So the software embedded in its engineering flight computer contained a command loss subroutine.

When the command did not arrive on schedule, an internal alarm went off.

The computer went into an algorithm designed to protect the spacecraft and its mission.

First Voyager was placed in a stable, passive state. Then, for two weeks, Voyager waited for the ground control to solve whatever problem had arisen on Earth, and to send the spacecraft a new command sequence. The basic design assumption was that the control centers would be sending a stream of commands, frantically trying to get the spacecraft’s attention.

When no command sequence was received Voyager assumed the fault was with itself. It went through an emergency routine, in a bid to reestablish contact with the Deep Space Network stations.

The procedure worked in a loop. First the computer tried to figure out whether the craft’s radio antenna was still pointing at Earth. Voyager had sensors to detect the sun, and fixed, bright stars like Canopus; it knew where it was in three-dimensional space. The craft was smart enough to know where Earth should be, relative to the fixed stars, at any moment during the extended mission.

So the software checked the angles, and the antenna was pointed at Earth.

Still no commands were detected.

Voyager’s next assumption was that its radio receiver was dead. So it shutdown its primary radio and turned on its backup receiver. It broadcast telemetry to Earth, indicating what it thought might have happened.

There was no response from Earth.

Voyager went back to the beginning of the loop, and began the reacquisition process once more…

It could not know there was nobody on Earth who was listening, any more, to voices from the sky.

The Space Shuttle orbiter Discovery sailed over the equator of Titan, five hundred miles above rust-brown cloud tops. It was flying with its payload bay facing the clouds, and its instruments, battered by their billion-mile flight, peered down at the hidden surface. The blunt heatshields of two Apollo capsules, facing Titan, glowed in the light of the world they had come so far to challenge.

Nicola Mott sat in the flight deck commander’s seat, loosely strapped in.

Titan hung above the flight deck windows, above her head.

From pole to pole, she could see no differences, no details in the drab burnt-brown clouds, no breaks, no structure. There was perhaps a subtle shading, the south hemisphere a little lighter than the north. But the light was so uncertain that Mott couldn’t be sure. And Titan was dark, darker than the enhanced Voyager and Cassini images had led her to expect, a deep dull brown rather than orange.

It was almost like the flybys of Venus again, Mott thought. Here was the same perfect sphere, the billiard-ball-smooth sheen of haze and cloud, hiding any glimpse of the ground. But the light of the sun was less than a hundredth its strength at Venus; the clouds of Venus had been dazzling white, almost blinding, like sheets of sunlight. Titan looked almost spectral, sombre, the ochre hue of its clouds drawn from the palette of some obsessive, gloomy painter.

And Titan was a small world. Its curve was evident, much more so than Earth from low orbit, and its orange-brown belly protruded at Mott, shaded, obviously three-dimensional. Discovery rolled into another two-hour sunrise. Mott watched the sun lift through the cloud layers. The thin light, occluded by the air, gave her glimpses of structure: onion-skin layers deep in the clouds, perhaps the glimmerings of faint outer shells, beyond the bulk of the atmosphere. And Saturn rise was… remarkable.

The planet was like a sculpture of glass, two or three feet across, held at arm’s length. Saturn itself was a fat ball of milky yellow crystal, at the heart of a plate of shining rings. The rings — contained well within the orbit of Titan — were tipped up, from Mott’s perspective; they emerged from darkness on the face of the planet, and formed a thin, banded ellipse. Looking along the rings, Mott could see other moons, a string of glowing crescent-beads.

Under the clouds of Titan the sky would be hidden. It was going to be hell to know that Saturn itself was suspended above the clouds, as motionless as Earth in the black sky of the Moon, and yet forever invisible.

The hatch opened. Benacerraf and Rosenberg came bustling onto the flight deck, up the tunnel from the orbiter’s mid deck. Through the open access-way to the mid deck — through the airlock and the connecting tunnel to the hab module — Mott could hear the aimless crooning of Bill Angel, blind and alone. His gull-like cries were diminished by distance; sound didn’t carry well in the reduced pressure of the hab module. Mott said, “What do you want?”

“We have to talk,” Rosenberg said. Benacerraf looked at Mott and shrugged.

Mott, reluctantly, released her restraints and pulled herself across the cabin.

Rosenberg said, “We have to discuss Bill. How in hell are we going to get him to the surface?”

Benacerraf sighed. “Damn your logical mind, Rosenberg.”

But it’s a non-question, Mott thought. She avoided the eyes of the others; she stared at the dull ochre Titan highlights on the instrument panels. She said, “Logical, maybe, but he’s starting from an assumption.”

“What assumption?”

“That we take Bill down at all.”

There was a long silence.

The three of them drew closer together — like conspirators, Mott thought, their hair drifting in the sluggish currents of the air. They were gaunt, withered by years of microgravity and a lousy diet and canned air; they must look like three witches, gathered around some spell-book, plotting the fate of another human being.

Benacerraf said at last, “There is nowhere to leave him. We’re taking Discovery down too, remember.”

“I know,” Mott said. “That doesn’t alter the suggestion.”

Rosenberg raised greying eyebrows. “Right. And you’ll be the one who will shove him out the airlock.”

Mott opened her mouth to reply.

Benacerraf said, “This isn’t doing us any good. Niki, Bill Angel didn’t ask to finish up as he has. He’s just turned out to be the weakest of us, is all. It could have been any of us. And now, he’s a billion miles from the nearest person who can help him. Save for us. So we take him down.”

“Anyhow,” Rosenberg said, “you know what Houston says. Maybe being returned to a stable gravity environment will help bring Bill out of this. He’s always going to be disabled, of course. But he was a competent astronaut. Maybe he can still be useful.”

“And you believe that?” Mott said mildly.

“Enough,” Benacerraf snapped.

Mott thought about pushing it.

After six years, she was sick of Benacerraf’s peevish bossiness. One day, perhaps, she was going to have to challenge the authority that Benacerraf assumed so easily. But now wasn’t the time.

“Which returns me to my original question,” Rosenberg said. “How do we get him to the surface?”

Benacerraf frowned. “Each Apollo can hold one, two, three — even all four of us if it has to. Logically, we ought to split evenly between the capsules: two and two.”

Rosenberg shook his head. “I got to advise against that. We know little enough about this Titan entry as it is, and we’re not sure how the Apollos will behave, after a couple of decades in store and six years of space soak. Anything could happen. Who would want to be alone in a failing Command Module with Bill Angel?”

“Even if he was sedated?”

“Even so. Paula, the entry is going to take hours, remember.”

Mott said, “We could all four of us ride down in the one capsule. It wouldn’t be comfortable, but with a couch installed in the lower equipment bay—”

“Again, bad idea,” Rosenberg said. “We ought to go down separately. If one Apollo has a bad landing, we only hurt half the crew; the rest are on hand to help.”

“But,” Benacerraf said, evidently irritated, “that logic leaves us with only one combination. One and three: one person alone, and two of us sandwiching Angel. Hardly an ideal.”

“Well,” Mott said angrily, “it might not be what we planned. But it’s what we’re left with. We never planned for Siobhan to get herself killed—”

“Nicola. The one alone. It has to be you.”

“That hadn’t occurred to Mott. Tell me why,” she said.

“You’re the nearest thing to a pilot we have left. I could trust you to fly that Apollo down alone, but not myself or Rosenberg.”

To fly down to the surface of Titan, a new world, alone… She felt an odd mixture of exhilaration and sheer, unadulterated fear.

It would be the first time the crew had been separated, since the launch day.

The three of them gathered a little closer, watching each other, as if in awe of how far they had travelled together, of what they were planning now.

“All right,” Mott said. “I’ll do it.”

Both Rosenberg and Benacerraf, simultaneously and apparently on impulse, reached out towards her. Physical contact had become a major taboo for them all; but now they held onto each other’s arms, feebly hugging.

Benacerraf said, “We don’t have anything to fear. We can do this. We’ll be there for you when you land.”

“Sure,” said Mott. “See you in the mud.”

Rosenberg tugged at his wispy beard. “We need another name. A call-sign for the base camp, the landing site of the orbiter… You know, in Greek mythology the Titans were a family of giants, the children of Uranus and Gaia, the sky and the Earth. Before the gods, they sought to rule the heavens. You’ll know some of their names: Rhea, Tethys, Iapetus, Hyperion, Phoebe. And others — Cronos, the leader, Rhea, Oceanus, Coeus, Crius, Mnemosyne. Their stronghold was Mount Othrys, a counterpart of Mount Olympus.”

“Oh,” Benacerraf said. “Hence the Geological Survey name for our friendly ice mountain down there. So what happened to the Titans?”

“Cronos overthrew Uranus, his father. But then there was a ten-year battle, between the Titans and the gods. Zeus beat out Cronos by bringing in Hundred-armed Giants — the Hecatoncheires — as his allies. Then the Titans were imprisoned, for eternity, in Tartarus. They were locked behind huge bronze doors, and the Hundred-armed Giants were appointed jailers—”

“Tartarus? Where’s that?”

Rosenberg pulled a face. “You don’t want to know. A place as far below Hades as Hades is below Heaven.”

Mott stabbed a finger at Titan. “Then that’s the name for our colony. Where we’re going to have to live out the rest of our lives. Underneath all that orange shit. Tartarus.”

Nobody disagreed.

The rusty light of Titan, washing from the hab module’s multiple monitors, made their skin look old, pallid.

Mott lay on her back in the center couch of Apollo Command Module CM-115, now known as Jitterbug.

She was alone in here. She was wearing her orange pressure suit. Cool air washed over her face, inside her helmet, bringing with it a smell of plastic and metal; all around her the fans and pumps of the Command Module clicked and whirred. It was a mundane, comforting noise, louder than a Shuttle orbiter or the hab module, somehow more obviously mechanical; it was like being inside some huge, elaborate clock.

She looked ahead, through the small docking windows set in Jitterbug’s nose.

She was sailing backwards over the orange-brown cloud-sea of Titan. She was in Titan’s shadow, but some light was diffused forward by the thick atmosphere, so that the clouds before Jitterbug were a blanket of rusty oranges and browns, fading into curved darkness far ahead of her.

And now, in her side windows, the sun rose, a spot of light like a helicopter searchlight, rising up from the blurred haze, the multiple layers of atmosphere she would, today, traverse.

It was probably the last dawn she would ever witness.

“Hey there, Jitterbug.”

It was Benacerraf. Mott flicked the switch on her microphone wire. “I hear you, Bifrost.”

“I can see you, fat as a goose.”

She twisted in her couch. And there, framed by the small window to her right, was Bifrost. The familiar cone profile of the second Apollo, illuminated by Titan light, was unmistakable.

In space, the various upgrades were obvious. No attempt had been made to refurbish the Apollos’ old ablative heatshields. The base of Bifrost, which would take the brunt of the entry heating, was coated by black silica-based tiles, the same material used on the undersurface of the Shuttle orbiters, bonded to an aluminum honeycomb beneath. And the upper conical surface, which would reach much lower temperatures, was coated with white Nomex felt tiles. The black and white finish, punctured by windows and the gaping mouths of reaction control nozzles, gave Bifrost an oddly modern look, Mott thought, compared to the baroque silver hulls of the old Moon-mission designs.

Strapped to Bifrost’s base there was another novelty. The classic fat silver cylinder of the Apollo Service Module was replaced by a squat tube six feet long — about half the length of the Command Module — with a fat, flaring nozzle. This was a PAM-D-II, a payload assist module. It was a Thiokol solid rocket booster which had been used as an upper stage for launching satellites from Shuttle and Earth-orbit flights. It was strapped to the center of Bifrost’s heat-shield by metal straps, which would be severed by pyrotechnic bolts.

The PAM would be used to knock Bifrost out of orbit…

Discovery had already been flown down, under automatics, to the surface. So here were two Apollo Command Modules, flying in formation around a moon of Saturn.

“Okay, Niki,” Benacerraf called over now. “You ready for your preburn checklist?”

“I got it.” The checklist was Velcroed to the instrument panel in front of Mott.

“Thrust switches to normal.”

Mott closed her switches. “Thrust switches normal.”

“Inject prevalves on.”

“Okay. Prevalves on.”

“One minute to the burn, Niki. Arm the translational controller.”

“Armed…”

The crews had agreed that Mott, alone in Jitterbug, would be walked through her entry burn first, with the aid of Rosenberg and Benacerraf. Bifrost would descend an orbit later, two hours after Mott.

Thus, Mott would be the first human to land on Titan.

She had been given the mission’s remaining flag to set up, a plastic-coated Stars and Stripes, neatly wrapped in a little cellophane bundle. And on her chest was stitched a tiny Union Jack.

“Thirty seconds,” Benacerraf said. “Thrust-on enable, Niki.”

Mott unlocked the control and gave it a half-turn.

“Fifteen seconds. That’s it. You’ve done it, Niki. Sit tight, now.”

Sit tight.Sure. And what if the PAM-D doesn’t fire, after six years of space soak? The PAM-Ds were pretty reliable, but had been known to fail, even in Earth orbit, a couple of hours after leaving the KSC pad. And nobody was sure what would happen if those straps failed to sever, and a Command Module finished up carrying a PAM-D, partially expended, through the fires of entry.

She braced herself for the kick in the back.

“Two, one.”

There was a bang, a rattly thrust which pushed her into her couch. It had the crisp, crude sharpness characteristic of solid rocket burns. The push felt enormous, but she knew it was no more than a half-G.

There was a green light before her.

“Retrofire,” she said.

“Copy the retrofire, Niki. See you on the ground. Don’t mess up the place before we get there.”

“I won’t.”

The burn lasted thirty seconds, yellow rocket light flaring from the PAM-D nozzle ahead of Jitterbug.

The thrust died.

She heard a thump of pyrotechnics, a clatter against the hull, like birds hopping over a tin roof. It was the straps holding the PAM-D against the heatshield; they had burned through, and the PAM-D was discarded. After a few seconds she could see it through her window, a squat cylinder spinning away over the orange clouds, shiny straps dangling, abandoned after being hauled across two billion miles for its half-minute of service.

Jitterbug was still in orbit around Titan. But Mott’s orbit now would take her dipping deep into the outer layers of Titan’s thick atmosphere. And there, she would lose so much energy that she would not be able to climb out again.

She was, she knew, committed.

“Godspeed, Niki,” Benacerraf called distantly.

Six hundred miles above the surface of Titan, on the fringe of the deep, massive atmosphere, Mott felt the first brushes of deceleration. The couch frame dug into her microgravity-softened flesh.

In her window, she could still see Saturn, like a gigantic, gaudy toy.

There was a rattle of solenoids. Outside the windows, to her left and right, there were little flashes of light. That was the gas of the RCS clusters, flaring against the air of Titan. The onboard computer was trying to keep Jitterbug in its forty-mile-wide reentry corridor, before the air thickened so much that the reaction control system was disabled.

A light came on before her. It was the oh-five-G light, the measure of the first feeble tugs of deceleration.

Five hundred miles high, Mott passed through the first haze layer. It was a shell of faint rusty light, which seemed to coalesce above her, blurring Saturn’s image.

It ought to be a gentle entry. CM-115 was entering the atmosphere from low circular orbit around Titan. It would have to shed a mile per second against atmospheric friction. That compared to the Earth-orbital velocity of five miles per second survived by the Shuttle, Gemini and Mercury, and with the even greater seven miles per second survived by Apollo capsules returning from the Moon. The peak deceleration, in the next few minutes, ought to be no more than one and a half G. That was eminently survivable by an Apollo — even a Command Module that had been in storage for most of Mott’s lifetime…

The pressure mounted, climbing fast, impossibly quickly, slamming her into the couch. Titan’s thin, cold upper atmosphere was hauling at Jitterbug in earnest.

…Assuming, of course, the theoretical models of Titan’s atmosphere were right. And Mott, after six years in microgravity, for all her exercising, wasn’t as robust as she used to be.

A pale, grey-white glow began to gather at the base of the window. It was plasma, the atoms of Titan’s air smashed to pieces by the passage of this intruder from Earth, gathering in a thickening shock layer beneath the Command Module. The air of Earth produced a pinkish, almost welcoming glow on reentry. But the light of Titan’s plasma, a thin mix of ionized nitrogen, methane and argon, was a cold pearl-grey glow.

Even the plasma was alien here.

Benacerraf was still speaking to her, she realized belatedly. She tried to call back, to acknowledge; but Benacerraf’s voice was breaking up in static as the plasma shell engulfed Jitterbug.

A hundred and eighty miles above the surface, the deceleration peaked. Mott lay on her back, buffeted, compressed, while the cabin equipment rattled around her. She was deep in the atmosphere, moving at Mach twenty. The weight on her was huge, crushing, worse than anything she had imagined in six years of anticipation of this ordeal. The surges in deceleration seemed astonishingly abrupt, violent. She could feel her internal organs sliding over each other, flattening against her spinal column. Her limbs felt as brittle as twigs, her muscles as limp as wet string; she didn’t dare move a limb. She didn’t seem to have the strength to draw in a breath, and she felt panic creeping over her as the oxygen in her lungs grew depleted.

The colors leached out of the big clunky control panel in front of her, and walls of darkness closed in around her vision. It was hard even to blink, to relieve the dryness of her eyes. Her mouthpiece felt like an iron bar being forced against her jaw. Unable to see a chronometer, she tried to count, to reduce this experience to a finite time that must pass. A thousand and one. A thousand and two…

She couldn’t concentrate. She lost count. She wasn’t even able to maintain the rhythm of the count.

Starved of blood and oxygen, her brain was closing down. The darkness at the fringe of her vision closed in, like sweeping curtains.

Then, as suddenly as it had mounted, the pressure faded. The weight on her chest was lifted off. She sucked in air, her chest expanding against emptiness.

The glow of the plasma was fading. Beyond Jitterbug’s window there was a rusty orange glow. Already she was deep within the air-ocean of this drowned moon; above her was a hundred miles of murky aerosol haze, a hundred miles of cigarette smoke.

For the first time in six years, Mott’s sky was no longer black.

The fiery entry phase was already over. The G meter read nought point one four — Titan gravity, one-seventh of a G. Three minutes after leaving orbit she was falling, alone, towards a hidden landscape, at nine hundred miles an hour.

Now, the first drogue parachute should deploy. It would burst from the parachute compartment in Jitterbug’s nose with a pyrotechnic bang, blowing away the apex cover of the compartment, and then open with a snap…

Nothing happened.

She checked her mission timer and G-meter against the checklist, still fixed to the control panel before her.

The drogue should have opened by now. If the drogue didn’t open, neither would the main chutes.

Shit, she thought. What did I miss?

She punched the manual drogue deploy button.

After a few seconds she heard the bang of the drogue’s pyrotechnics. The drogue chute hauled at the capsule, jolting her hard into her couch.

Jitterbug’s velocity slowed — in thirty seconds and five miles — to three hundred feet per second, well below the speed of sound.

A hundred miles up, the air temperature outside was minus 120 degrees C.

Another bang. That had to be the mains, the three eighty-footer ringsails which would lower Jitterbug gently to the surface of Titan. Through the little docking windows above her Mott could see the main chutes as they unfolded, streaming upwards lazily in the thickening air. The chutes were unbleached, to save weight; they were yellow, like three big dirty jellyfish.

Jitterbug became a huge pendulum, swinging on a wide, slow path, suspended beneath the mains, in Titan’s feeble gravity taking all of forty-five seconds to complete a cycle; it was a slow, comforting rocking.

She felt her heartbeat slow, the moment of panic over.

What did I miss?

The Command Module was supposed to be controlling its own sequence of operations, now, as it went through its cycle of pyrotechnic explosions and parachute deployment. The main Arming Timer fired the pyrotechnics in a hard-wired sequence keyed to deceleration measured by a G-switch. The idea was to improve reliability, to provide a hardware-managed timelining that was independent of the Command Module’s computer processor and software.

That was the idea, anyhow. She scanned back up her checklist.

…Oh.

She had been supposed to enable the whole system by throwing a couple of switches, to start the Titan landing system and disable the reaction control shutdown. She should have done that just after emerging from the heavy deceleration of the entry phase.

She hadn’t. Maybe if she hadn’t been alone, she wouldn’t have missed it.

So far it all seemed to be working, however. Except for her human error. Everything — her life — depended on how robust the reworked systems now proved to be, in the face of that mistake.

She heard a rattle of solenoids; the capsule jerked about, startling her.

It was the reaction control thrusters. They were still firing, trying to damp oscillations in the vehicle’s attitude, their action futile so deep in the atmosphere. It shouldn’t be happening. The RCS should have been disabled, at the start of the auto sequence that she’d missed.

She snapped the RCS switch to OFF. The solenoid rattle died immediately.

The fact was, she was off the nominal program, now.

By failing to enter that command to start the new customized automated sequence, she was having Jitterbug follow fallback paths.

Fifty-year-old logic paths, designed, originally, for entry into Earth’s comparatively benign atmosphere. And although those logic paths had been tested out, there was no way they could have been made as safe as the primary path…

She felt a flicker of unease.

For fifteen minutes Jitterbug drifted under its main chutes, its speed gradually dropping. It was as if she was suspended above the surface of Titan in the metallic gondola of some balloon.

She monitored the Command Module’s clunky systems, waiting for the next glitch, the next anomaly.

She tried the periscope display. This was an oval piece of glass about a foot across set in the middle of the instrument panel before her. The periscope gave her a fish-eye view of the surface, looking down past the scorched white tiles of the hull:

A layer of thin white cloud, like cirrus, came ballooning up around her. Methane ice. Once through that, she looked down on a rolling, unbroken layer of thick, dark methane-nitrogen clouds, hiding the murky ground below. The clouds were almost Earthlike: fat, fluffy cumuli…

She could turn the periscope this way and that, with a little joystick in front of her. She imagined the tiny lens poking out of the hull and swivelling, above her head. The periscope had actually been cannibalized from an antique Mercury capsule, one of the original production run, which had been designed without windows; the periscope had been installed after protests from the astronauts to give them a view.

Even the effort of twisting the joystick seemed to deplete the muscles of her hand. It was going to take her a good while after landing before she had acclimatized enough to clamber out of her couch and try cracking the hatch.

After fifteen minutes the Command Module’s velocity was reduced to a hundred and twenty feet per second, and she was ninety miles above the surface. Now, with a crack of pyrotechnics above her, the main chute was jettisoned.

For an instant she was falling freely.

And then the final chute, the paraglider, opened up; and she was joked back into her couch once more.

She let out her breath. She was through another command sequence which hadn’t gone wrong. Maybe she would live through this yet.

The paraglider was just a shaped canopy, marginally steerable. It was another old idea, that had been tried out for Gemini. Thus, a Gemini paraglider and a Mercury periscope should let Mott fly an Apollo capsule, like Dumbo, down to the wreck of a Shuttle orbiter, a billion miles from home…

Fifty miles above the ground, Jitterbug was immersed in thickening orange petrochemical haze. But the sun was still plainly visible as a brilliant disc, surrounded by an aureole, a yellow-brown halo. Mott swivelled her periscope until Saturn was fixed at the center of her oval window. But already the water-color yellow wash of Saturn’s surface was becoming fainter, obscured by the uniform brown smear of the smog. She stared into the periscope until at last the planet’s fat, elliptical outline was lost, as if fading out on a poorly tuned TV screen, and the cloud closed over.

The sun, she saw, had vanished too. She had watched her last dawn, her last sunset. She was stuck down here, for good or ill.

Forty miles high, Jitterbug fell out of the condensate haze, into a layer of clearer air. Then, at thirty miles, it penetrated the fat methane clouds. The temperature was close to its minimum here, at minus two hundred degrees Centigrade. The clouds were dark, brooding, as if stormy. Deep within the clouds, the cabin grew dark, and the lights of the instruments on the panel before her seemed to glow brighter.

Suddenly the altimeter kicked in. She was at a hundred and fifty thousand feet, it said. Feet, not miles: the measure of an aircraft, ballooning down through Titan’s atmosphere.

Jitterbug emerged from the base of the clouds, which now hid the orange sky.

Gradually, through mist and scattered cloud, for the first time, Titan’s surface became visible to human eyes.

…Fluffy clouds of ethane vapor lay draped over glimmering circular lakes, which were cupped in continents of water ice. The liquid in those lakes was black to her vision, the round ponds puncturing the red-brown carcass of Titan like neat bullet-holes. It might have been a high-altitude view of Earth’s surface, though rendered in sombre, reds and browns, a twilit panorama…

She reached out and took hold of a handset on the panel in front. of her. The handset controlled the paraglider, by tweaking at its cables. Using this she ought to be able to fly the Command Module right in to the orbiter, with an accuracy of — the designers had told her — a hundred yards or so. And in the limited VR sims they’d set up, she’d consistently scored better than that, getting down to within thirty or forty feet of the target.

But first she had to spot her target, the orbiter on the surface. She peered anxiously into the periscope. The surface of Titan — in the fish-eye view, bulging towards her — was resolving into a landscape of mud and crater lakes. The smaller lakes, a couple of miles across, were simple circles. But she could see central peaks protruding from the centers of some of the larger lakes, their shores washed clean of muddy slush.

And now Jitterbug drifted over a pair of giant craters, each perhaps fifty miles across. In one of these the central peak seemed to have broadened into a dome, so that the ethane pool was contained in a thin ring around a central island. But she could see a pit at the center of the dome, itself containing a small pool, so the whole structure had a bull’s-eye shape, with the solid circle and band of dark fluid contained by the circular crater rim. And in the second of the big craters, the outer annulus of fluid seemed to be heaped up against one wall of the crater — perhaps by some tidal effect — so that the lake was in the form of a semicircular horseshoe. The landscape was strange, even the shape of the lakes bizarre. This is Titan, she reminded herself with a shiver. You are a billion miles from home. And there’s nothing in human experience to guide you as to what you’ll find here. The Command Module shuddered, the hull groaning. She gripped her seat, hard. She could feel the hard metal frame through the thickness of her pressure suit gloves. The Command Module felt fragile around her; it was like being inside some flimsy aluminum bathysphere, descending into this murky orange ocean. Now she was suspended over a mountain range, wrinkles in the glimmering surface. The peaks were exposed, dark grey water ice bedrock, and the uniform orange coating of the lower ground lay in streaks that followed the contours of the mountain, like snow runs. The area looked familiar from Rosenberg’s Cassini maps. She turned the periscope, jerking it from one side of the ship to the other.

There.A little way away from the range was a crater lake, the muddy liquid pooled in the shape of a cashew nut.

It was Clear Lake: just like the radar images. And Mount Othrys must be somewhere in that range below her.

…She caught a glimpse of white, embedded on the dried-blood surface like a splinter of bone protruding from a wound.

It was a delta-shape. Discovery.

She grinned fiercely, her spirits rising for the first time since Saturn had disappeared. She wouldn’t even have to steer the paraglider much; now all she had to do was glide her way down this last ten thousand feet and—

There was a snap, somewhere in the wall high above her.

Murky air billowed into the cabin, above her face. There was a stink, of swamps and marshes and…

And methane. Titan air. And, mixed in with it, the sharp tang of nitrogen tetroxide, oxidizer from the RCS.

She couldn’t believe it; she sat staring as the orange mush billowed down towards her. Following some antique command, the cabin pressure relief valve had opened. The valve was a two-inch nozzle designed to let in warm Pacific air, for returning Moon voyagers. It was not supposed to open on the way down to Titan.

It was the failure she had been waiting for. This had to be some consequence of her failing to follow the correct automation sequence earlier. Another untested logic path. But why the hell hadn’t that damn valve simply been welded shut?

It was a multiple failure. Multiple failures always got you, in the end.

And while she lay here and thought about it, she had sucked in a lungful of freezing, toxic Titan air…

She closed her mouth and eyes and pulled her faceplate down. It snapped into place, and she felt a cool blue blast of oxygen on her face. She breathed out, trying to empty her lungs. But that, she realized, was only going to start the methane and nitrogen tet circulating in her life support.

The stink of swamp gas was overwhelming. And the nitrogen tet seemed to be burning at her lungs and eyes; she could barely see.

She considered trying to find some way to close that relief valve. But now she could barely see the instrument panel.

Anyhow, maybe it was better for the oxygen in the cabin to be overwhelmed by Titan air. If that methane caught a spark, Jitterbug would explode.

She was coughing, her throat and lungs aching.

The descent was nearly over, anyhow.

The cold air of Titan wrapped over her limbs. She found herself shivering already. When she got to the ground, she’d have to move quickly to get to the heated EVA suit. She rehearsed the moves she would make. Stand up, as best she could, and reach under the couch for the big net bag there; haul out the suit…

Jitterbug crashed into the tholin slush.

The fall was no more severe than if Jitterbug had been dropped on Earth from five or six feet. But to Mott it felt like a huge impact, an astonishing eruption of agony throughout her bruised body.

…And now the Command Module tipped to the right. She could feel the roll, see the orange-black landscape wheel past the windows. Perhaps the paraglider hadn’t come loose, and was dragging Jitterbug over. Or perhaps she had landed on some kind of slope, a crater wall maybe, and was rolling.

Orange-brown mud splashed across the glass of the windows to her right, and turned them dark. Mott found herself hanging there in her straps, with cabin trash raining down around her: bits of paper, urine bags, discarded washcloths. The Stable 2 position, she thought. Upside down. One whole side of Jitterbug must be buried in the icy slush of Titan.

For a moment there was stillness, a cramped creaking as the hull cooled.

Then a window to her right cracked in two. Orange-black slush forced its way into the cabin, flowing, viscous.

Mott, suspended, began coughing again.

She was stuck in her seat. She couldn’t move. She was going to freeze. Help was two hours away, or a billion miles, depending on how you looked at it.

When the Titan slush lapped against her legs, she could feel the cold of it seep into her bones.

No footprints and flags for me, after all. But I got here. I got to touch Titan.

The slush was rising. It would reach her head in a few seconds. She tried not to struggle.

So quickly, it was over.

Heat and cold, she thought; fire and ice. That’s what separates Siobhan and me: fire and ice, at the extremities of the Solar System.

The slush forced its way through her faceplate, driving shards of plexiglass before it.

After its muddy splashdown, Command Module CM-115 settled deeper into the icy slush of Titan, its aluminum hull creaking as it cooled.

A wall-mounted camera peered at Benacerraf, as she lay in her couch, making history. She felt flat, deflated, battered by the events of the entry, the loss of contact with Nicola.

But she had her role to play.

She said, “Houston, Bifrost. Tartarus Base here. We have landed.”

“Amen to that.” said Rosenberg.

Without enthusiasm, she imagined how their words would be collected by Cassini and hurled across eighty light minutes, dispersing and growing fainter, to whoever on Earth was left to listen…

She turned her head. Every neck muscle ached; her head felt like a sack of water, ungainly and heavy, strapped to the top of her spine.

Rosenberg was sitting in the left-hand couch, Benacerraf the right. Angel was sandwiched between them in the center couch, his bony body swathed in its bubble of orange pressure suit, pressed up against Benacerraf. He was apparently at peace, Benacerraf thought, his sedated madness contained for now within the orange high-technology bubble of his suit.

The window to her right was already frosted, the condensation from their breath and sweat frozen against the glass. She could see little of the landscape, in the murky twilight beyond. Even after just a few minutes on the surface, the tholin drizzle had coated the windows of Bifrost with a thin, purple-brown, organic scum; it streaked down the window like leaking oil.

The contrast with the warm, brightly-lit, mundane interior of the Apollo was marked; to leave here, she thought, would be like stepping out of your mom’s kitchen into a stormy night.

But Rosenberg seemed to feel differently. Elated.

“We’re here,” Rosenberg said. “My God.”

“Yes. We’re here. But do you really think anybody gives a damn any more?”

“I do,” he said, his tone defiant. “I do. We achieved what we set out to achieve. This is Apollo 11, all over again.” He turned to face her; there was a smile on his face, framed by his open visor. “This is history, Paula. There’s a new world out there. You’ll be the first: the first since Armstrong—”

“No,” she snapped. “Nicola was the first, whatever has happened to Jitterbug. Don’t you ever forget that.”

Rosenberg turned away, and for a moment there was silence, broken only by the hum of the Command Module’s systems.

She released her restraints.

The Apollo Command Module wasn’t designed to land anywhere but Earth. So, it didn’t have an airlock. When Benacerraf opened the hatch, all the Earth-like air inside the cabin was going to be lost, to be replaced by Titan’s methane-laced nitrogen. So all three of them, Angel included, would have to be in their EMUs — their extravehicular mobility units, their surface suits.

Therefore, by remorseless logic, Benacerraf and Rosenberg were going to have to strip and dress Angel.

Benacerraf got hold of the frame of her couch and pushed herself upright. The Command Module was so small her head was almost brushing the instrument panel above her.

There was a dull ringing in her ears. The colors leached from the instrument panel, and everything turned a dull golden-brown.

“Oh,” she said. “Oh, wow.”

Rosenberg was sitting up too, his face grey. “Just take it easy, Paula. Sit for a while. Let your body figure out which way is up.”

“This one-seventh gravity is a killer, huh.”

She could feel her heart laboring to pump blood up this unaccustomed gravity gradient. And this, she thought dismally, was with the assistance of the G-suit that was still compressing the slack blood vessels of her legs.

Slowly — after maybe ten minutes — the ringing subsided, and the colors returned. Her heart was still hammering, though.

Benacerraf knelt on her couch. With Rosenberg’s help she reached over Angel, and hauled him off his couch and onto her own. His space-attenuated body weighed an effective thirty or forty pounds, she estimated. But even so it took real effort, by both of them, to wrestle him around the cluttered little cabin.

When Angel was transferred, she released latches and folded up his center couch, and stowed it away in the lower equipment bay, the roomier space beneath the couches. Now she was able to stand. With Rosenberg beside her, she began to work on the inert Angel.

She twisted off Angel’s helmet and gloves. She detached the umbilical tubes which connected his suit to the cabin’s life support supplies, and pulled off his boots. Then, with Rosenberg, she hauled the heavy, elasticated pressure garment off Angel’s limp, unresponsive limbs.

Underneath, Angel was already wearing his basic thermal underwear, with his Heating Garment over the top and a G-suit — inflatable rubber trousers — over that. Benacerraf began to strip off the G-suit.

Next she had to fit Angel’s urine collector, a huge, unlikely condom.

She took a deep breath. She reached down and pushed her hand inside Angel’s underwear. His groin was warm and faintly damp, she found, disgusted. She pulled Angel’s penis out of his underwear.

Rosenberg laughed. “Where no man has gone before.”

“Shut up, Rosenberg.”

As she tried to push the condom over Angel’s penis, he started to move. He was grinding his hips. She looked into his face. His ruined eyes were closed, of course, but there was a grin stretching his lips; a thin sheen of saliva glistened on his lower lip.

He was getting an erection; his grinding was pushing the penis against the palm of her hand.

She snatched her hands away. “Shit,” she said.

Rosenberg laughed again. “Hot mike, commander.”

“Fuck you, Rosenberg. Bill? Bill, can you hear me?”

Angel crooned wordlessly, rocking his head to left and right.

Rosenberg pressed an infuser to Angel’s neck. Angel subsided, almost immediately. “Old bastard,” Rosenberg said without malice. “The only bit of him that still works is his libido.”

“And how,” Benacerraf said, “are we going to get rid of that?”

At Angel’s groin, the erection sprouted like a miniature flagpole, the veins thick.

Rosenberg grinned. “I always thought Bill was all hat and no horse.”

“It’s not funny, Rosenberg.”

“Don’t worry.” He reached down to a storage compartment and pulled out a stainless steel spoon. He pressed its bowl against the frosty glass of the window behind him, and tapped the tip of Angel’s glans with the chilled bowl.

Angel grunted and stirred.

The penis sagged immediately, like a deflated balloon.

“A nurse’s trick I picked up during my med training,” Rosenberg said. “Never thought I’d have to use it. And now I’m going to mark this damn spoon, to make sure I never eat with it.”

Grimacing, Benacerraf reached down once more and tucked Angel’s penis briskly into the condom.

With Rosenberg’s help, she lifted Angel into his Beta-cloth outer garment. The sleeves and neck were terminated with steel rings that would snap onto Angel’s EVA gloves and helmet. Now she fitted a tube over his condom attachment; there was a bag sewn into the outer garment to store a couple of pints of urine. Angel was already wearing a kind of diaper — an absorbent undergarment — that would soak up any bowel movement he couldn’t defer.

Benacerraf hoped like hell he would defer. Wiping Angel’s ass for him was one chore she hadn’t yet had to endure, one aspect of Angel’s descent into hell where he’d managed, so far, to hang onto a little dignity.

Benacerraf hauled Angel’s PLSS — his Personal Life Support System, his backpack — up from storage lockers under the couches. The pack was a big, massive box coated in Beta-cloth. Here it weighed just twenty pounds, but she could feel the mass of the pack, its Newton’s-laws inertia undiminished; she had to handle it carefully to avoid battering the control panels. Rosenberg leaned Angel forward, and Benacerraf lifted the backpack over him and strapped it in place round him. The packs were adapted Shuttle technology, with lightweight batteries for power, air and water circulation pumps and fans, and lithium hydroxide canisters for scrubbing out carbon dioxide. Not much more advanced than the packs which had sustained men on the Moon. The suits would support EVAs of seven or eight hours, if they were lucky.

Next came the fitting of Angel’s umbilicals, hoses for air and water for the heating system. Rosenberg and Benacerraf worked across Angel’s chest, locking each hose into place, double-checking each other’s progress. “Locks checked, blue locks. Locks checked, red locks. Purge locks, double-locked…”

The surface of Titan represented a new challenge for EVA suit designers.

All previous EVAs — in Earth orbit, or on the Moon — had been in a vacuum. And the main challenge had been to surround the astronaut with an atmospheric pressure which, if not equivalent to Earth’s, was at least sufficient to sustain life. So the astronauts wore pressure garments, bubbles inflated with oxygen.

On Titan, it was different. On Titan, the air was thick — thicker, in fact, than on Earth. The air wasn’t breathable, and the astronauts still needed an Earth-equivalent air supply. But there was no need for pressurization against vacuum; the suits in that respect were a little more like deep-diving suits.

There was another novelty.

In the vacuum of space, the problem was keeping the astronaut’s body cool. Solar heat could be reflected by white overgarments, and sufficient heat of the astronaut’s own body could be retained by insulating layers; the trick was to wrap the body in a cooling garment — tubes of water to carry body heat away, and then radiate it into the vacuum.

Here on Titan, there was no vacuum. In the thick air conduction I and convection would work rapidly to carry away heat. The main problem on Titan, in fact, was the deadly cold. If that frigid slush or the thick, sluggish air above it came into anything close to direct contact with an astronaut’s flesh, life heat would be sucked away with frightening speed.

To combat the cold, the Titan suit was built on a Heating Garment — a sexless, skintight piece of clothing laced with wires and water pipes. The wires would heat the flesh, and the air which ran over it. It was like wearing an electric blanket. And the water in the tubes had high heat capacity; it would form a heat-retaining shell around the body. And over the heating suit the astronauts would wear layers of soft, insulating clothing.

The final outer garment was crude — much more primitive than the pressure suit — just layers of white Beta-cloth, fiberglass filaments coated with Teflon, with heat-retentive insulating material between, the chest unit studded with umbilical connectors and controls.

She fixed on Angel’s Snoopy hat, his flight helmet with its radio earphones and microphone, and over the top of that Rosenberg lifted Angel’s hard helmet with its visor, and twisted it into place against the seal at the neck. The last pieces of the suit were the gloves; these were close-fitting, and snapped onto rings at Angel’s wrist.

Now Rosenberg flicked a switch on Angel’s chest panel. Benacerraf could hear the soft, familiar hum of the pumps and fans in Angel’s backpack, the whoosh of the oxygen-nitrogen mix inside his helmet.

Rosenberg and Benacerraf worked through suit checks. There was a panel on the front of Angel’s chest which gave a digital readout of oxygen and carbon dioxide and pressure levels, and various malfunction warning lights. She could see Angel’s oxygen pressure level stabilizing.

Rosenberg nodded, satisfied.

Benacerraf sat back on the cabin’s right hand couch and peered into Angel’s helmet. Once again, they had got Bill sealed away, locked into his own self-contained world, as if within a private spacecraft, his degeneration concealed by the gleaming white Beta-cloth layers.

Benacerraf and Rosenberg got into their own suits.

A half-hour later, when they were done, they studied each other. Their names were stitched on the chests of the shining white suits, and the NASA logo and the Stars-and-Stripes were proudly emblazoned on their sleeves; they wore bright blue overboots, blue gloves. In the bulky suits, hardly able to move in the cramped cabin, they looked faintly ludicrous, like three snowmen, Benacerraf thought.

Rosenberg checked his suit display, and the status of the Command Module from a control panel.

“For the record,” he said, “We have a go for vent.”

“Affirmative,” Benacerraf said. “We’re all sealed up. Go for vent.”

“All right.” Rosenberg closed a switch on the wall.

Vents in the base and apex of the Command Module opened up. There was a harsh hiss.

There was a muddy brown swirl around Benacerraf’s feet. The thick air of Titan was forcing its way into the lower-pressure cabin of Bifrost. She watched the little dials on the instrument panel, yellow and green and red, bright primary Earth colors. The smog of Titan dimmed them, washing the dials over in an orange-brown murk.

“Okay,” Rosenberg said. “Everything is go. We are just waiting for the cabin pressure to equalize with the exterior sufficiently to open the hatch…”

His voice is becoming stilted, Benacerraf thought. He’s speaking for the camera. For the history books.

The hiss died away.

Rosenberg checked his gauges. “That’s it,” he said. “One and a half bars; pressure has equalized. You should be able to open the hatch now, Paula.”

Her heart thumping, suddenly conscious of the camera on her, Benacerraf turned.

Apollo’s hatch was a rectangle, two feet high and three wide, behind the center couch of the cabin. There was a window in the middle of it, already stained with tholin smears.

Benacerraf pulled at the hatch’s single handle. She could hear the twelve locking latches click open. The hatch swung outward, easily.

The open doorway framed a rectangle of mud-brown ground, laced by some darker substance. The Command Module seemed to have sunk into the slush, almost to the depth of the door frame.

She looked back at Rosenberg, who was standing between the two couches, watching her. Angel still seemed to be unconscious, sprawled like a flaccid white balloon on the right-hand couch.

Rosenberg took a camera down off its bracket on the wall, and focused on her. He said, “You ready for your one small step?”

It was what Tom Lamb had once said to her, floating in the light of Earth, long ago.

“Let’s do it.”

To get out of the narrow hatch, Benacerraf had to turn around and crawl out backwards. Rosenberg, keeping the camera focused on her, guided her. “You’re lined up nicely. Come back towards me… Okay, put your foot down… you’re doing fine… A little more.”

At last she found herself with her head outside the conical hull of Apollo, one foot on the floor of the capsule, and the other resting on the edge of the hatch.

She looked around. It was dark.

Darker than she’d expected, like a late, murky evening. The Huygens images and Bifrost’s own monitors, light-enhanced, had fooled her.

The ground was a plain, slightly undulating, thick with slush. A reddish-brown color dominated everything, although swathes of darker material streaked the landscape. The Command Module sat squat, a metal tent on a muddy, empty plain. The slush must be deep, she thought; even here, at the center of Bifrost’s splash crater, no bedrock water ice was exposed.

She couldn’t see the horizon through the dense, smoggy air. She knew that if she could crack her helmet, the air’s cargo of hydrocarbons would have made it smell like an oil refinery.

She lit up her helmet lamp. A pool of white light splashed on the ground. Organics glistened on the surface of the slush, moist, like flayed human tissue.

Rosenberg passed her the TV camera. She fixed it to a bracket which folded out of the exterior hull of Apollo. Rosenberg tested the camera on a monitor inside the Command Module. “Okay, the picture’s good,” he said. “A little dark and drab maybe, but nothing that a little image processing can’t fix.”

She said, “I’m in the hatchway. The Command Module has sunk into the surface through several inches, before the slush compacted to stop it. I can’t see any exposed ice. The basic color of the slush is a deep orange, or brown, but it’s laced with purples and blacks. Organics, I guess. It looks like nothing so much as mud — Houston gumbo, with a little industrial waste laced in.”

“It’s called tholin,” Rosenberg said drily.

“Yeah. And “tholin” is Greek for mud,” she snapped back. “Gumbo it is. All right. I’m going to step out of Bifrost now.”

She lifted her left foot off the door frame, reached out, and pushed it into the Titan gumbo. She tested her weight. She could feel the slush compacting, but even so her foot sank in several inches.

She tried to lift her foot out. The gumbo was clinging, heavy, and as it came free her boot made a sucking sound that carried through her helmet.

She left behind a saucer-sized crater, into which the gumbo oozed slowly. There was no distinguishable footstep — unlike Armstrong’s, she thought wistfully, which ought to persist in the crisp lunar dust for a million years. And when she tried to dig a furrow in the gumbo with her toe, she created a shallow valley that filled in almost immediately, without leaving a mark.

There was already tholin, splashed up from her tentative explorations, staining the white fabric coating her legs.

She replaced her left foot, and then lifted her right foot out over the bottom of the hatchway and planted it in the gumbo, still holding onto the hatchway with both hands. She let the gumbo take her weight.

She sank a few inches. But then the combination of the slush’s consistency and her own lightness in this one-seventh gravity stopped her falling further.

She let go of the door frame, and she was standing on Titan. She took a couple of steps forward. Once again she found it a real effort to lift her feet out of the clinging, sticky slush.

A breeze, fat and massive, buffeted her; the thick air moaned around her helmet.

She knelt down, pushing against the resistance of the suit, in the slush. Where her knee took her weight she could feel the diamond patterns of the wires and tubes sewn into her heating garment, and the chill of the slush penetrated to her flesh and bone. The orange-brown, sticky gumbo lapped over her legs, coating the pristine whiteness of her Beta-cloth suit. The ground was streaked, complex, inhomogeneous, full of chemistry.

She felt a sudden, visceral thrill; suddenly she knew the rightness of what they had done, to come here. This was no dead world, of rocks and geology, like the Moon. This material had been processed, for four billion years. She could tell, just looking at it. Save for the home world itself, this must be the most Earth-like world in the System.

She reached down, and dipped her blue gloves into the slush. The sticky gumbo dripped down through her fingers, like ocean bottom ooze.

She said: “This is the stuff of life.”

She took some experimental steps forward, walking away from the Command Module.

There was none of the exhilarating balloon-like floating which the Apollo astronauts had been able to achieve, bouncing off the hard surface of the Moon. The gumbo sucked at her feet, and her backpack, while not heavy, was an obvious mass at her back, throwing off her center of balance.

She found it hard to tell where the vertical was. On Earth, tipping a couple of inches either way was enough to trigger the balance mechanisms in her ears. But in this soft gravity she felt she could tilt a long way before her body could sense it; and in the murky gloom, on the dips and folds of the smoothed-out landscape, her visual cues weren’t strong. It all added to the feeling of strangeness.

She stopped, maybe twenty feet from the Command Module, and turned around.

The Command Module was a teepee before her, stuck in a broad splash crater. It had very evidently been dropped, from a great height, into the gumbo. The slush had washed up, viscous and sticky, against the lower hull, swamping the lower reaction thruster nozzles; and the powder-white upper surface of Apollo was streaked with purplish tholin deposits. In the open hatchway, Rosenberg was framed against a rectangle of glowing white light; it looked blue-green, in fact, Earth-like, in contrast with the burned orange of the rest of the landscape.

The camera sat on its stand, panning and focusing automatically.

She turned away.

Bifrost had come down in a shallow depression. Towards the horizon, beyond this slushy plain, there were rolling hills. They were the foothills surrounding Mount Othrys, she knew. The horizon itself was lost in gloom and haze.

The peaks were stained dark red and yellow, with slashes of ochre on their flanks, and streaks of grey, exposed water ice at the higher elevations. The landscape looked as if it had been water-colored by an unimaginative, heavy-handed child. There were scars in the hills’ profiles, perhaps left by recent icefalls. The profiles looked oddly softened: these were mountains of ice, not rock, after all. Clouds, red and orange, swirled above the hills. The clouds were fat methane cumuli, fifteen or twenty miles high, dark and oppressive.

This is ancient, unmarked terrain, she thought. Despite Rosenberg’s hypothesizing, she had the intuition that there had been no life here, no births, no bodies buried under this complex ground.

Bifrost had come down close to the center of the hemisphere that was turned away from Saturn. It was actually a little before local noon. They would have four or five days before Titan’s orbit around the primary would rotate the moon so that the invisible sun set, beyond the banks of cloud and haze. Then they would have to endure eight or ten days of darkness, while this face of the moon was turned away from the sun, before the next, protracted “dawn.”

So this was midday on Titan: as bright as it would get. It was like a dim twilight on Earth. Standing in the gumbo in this muddy light, in fact, was like being at the bottom of a pond.

In the half-distance she could see a splash of yellow-brown, like spilled paint. That must be Bifrost’s discarded parachute. They would have to reclaim that later, she knew; in the years to come — if they were to survive — they would need the cloth, everything they could salvage. Beyond the chutes she could clearly see the white, gumbo-streaked form of Discovery, perhaps a half-mile from Bifrost. It looked as if the orbiter had dug a shallow furrow in the surface of Titan, when it had come in from orbit for its automated glide landing.

And, a little further away, she saw a bone-white teepee shape. That had to be Jitterbug, Nicola’s Apollo. She couldn’t tell if Jitterbug was upright or not.

“Paula. Check your infra-red.”

Benacerraf pressed the switch on her chest panel which turned her visor into a crude night-vision monitor. This was an adapted bit of military technology.

The world turned brighter, but grey and blotchy, ill-defined in the long wavelengths of infra-red. The icy landscape was cold, dark, like a cloudy, Moonless night on Earth.

Bifrost,with its open hatch, was suddenly dazzling bright, a thing of straight lines and rectangles, still intensely hot compared to the thin cold of the rest of Titan’s landscape; that bulk of metal, she guessed, would take some hours to dissipate its heat entirely, before it turned as dark, in her new vision, as the ice which was consuming it. When she turned, she could easily see Discovery and Jitterbug, glowing like diamonds on the ice.

She looked down towards her feet, at her own body. Even through the insulating layers of Beta-cloth she was glowing with heat, her hands and arms clearly visible, shining; in infra-red, she looked like an angel descended to this icy world, alight with fire from the inner Solar System.

She lifted her head, tipping back on her heels inside the stiff suit.

The haze in the sky was transparent, in the near-IR wavelengths to which the visor was tuned. And through muddy purple-orange smears on her faceplate, she could see the sun, a coin of white light, rising above complex cloud layers, almost directly above her head. It was surrounded by an aureole, a disc of milky light that looked as if it was constructed of complex layers, like a huge glass onion in the sky, filled with light. There was probably, she thought apathetically, a lot of atmospheric physics contained in this single image.

Saturn, of course, was hidden by the bulk of Titan, forever below the horizon.

When she turned off the IR visor, returning to human vision, the sun disappeared. She was never going to see the sun with her naked eyes again, not even the attenuated star to which Sol had been reduced by their huge distance.

Her visor had gotten streaked with tholin slush, as if she had been caught in some filthy industrial rain. She lifted her right hand and wiped at the visor with her glove, but that just smeared the slush, making it worse.

I’m going to spend most of my life here just keeping my damn suit clean, she thought. And this tholin drizzle is going to be a constant problem. They should have fitted screen wipers to the visors. She took a deep breath. “I’m going to Jitterbug now.”

“Copy that, Paula.”

She turned towards that distant shard of bone-white, and began walking.

She found herself shuffling through the gumbo, a hunched old woman. Her helmet lamps cast pools of light on the glistening, purple-streaked surface.

“The slush supports my weight, but it is sticky, cloying,” she reported. “It’s very tiring to lift my legs out and take a fresh step. Like walking on soft sand. I think we’re going to have to do something about this, Rosenberg.”

“Snowshoes, maybe,” he said.

“Yeah. We’ll have to think about it.”

She could feel the heavy tubes of warm water wrapped around her limbs; the water seemed to slosh as she walked. Actually she liked the feeling; it was as if she was encased in a little shell of Earth-fluid which cradled her, here in the freezing slush of Titan.

But even so she felt cold. She could feel the heating system of her suit trying to work, the hot little chicken-wire diamonds close to her flesh. It didn’t seem to be sufficient. Her fingers, especially, seemed chilled, scarcely protected by the gloves; they were going to have to be careful of frost bite.

In fact, the cold seemed to deepen the further she got from Bifrost.

She reached Jitterbug.

The Apollo lay nose-down in the slush, its scorched base turned up to the tholin drizzle. She could see immediately what had happened. The paraglider had failed to separate, and had pulled Jitterbug over. The paraglider’s leads were still attached to the apex of the Command Module, and they trailed across the gumbo to the chute itself.

Even so, it was possible Mott was alive in there. Even conscious. Just stuck upside down in her couch, unable to get to the comms.

When she reached the Command Module, she brushed her hand against its hull. The white tiles were scorched from the entry and laced with tholin drizzle; she couldn’t feel their texture through the thickness of her glove. She could see some of Jitterbug’s windows, exposed above the slush. They were dark. There was evidently no power in there; there hadn’t been for some time.

She turned, and leaned against the Module’s wall, resting the mass of her backpack there. After her half-mile slog through the slush she was already exhausted, her heart thumping, the space-wasted muscles of her legs like jelly.

She sipped orange juice, trying to calm her breathing, her rattling heart, trying to face the next step.

Pushing through the sticky slush, she made her way around the capsule.

Jitterbug’s side hatch was suspended about four or five feet off the ground. The hatch window was dark, revealing nothing.

She was going to have to open up the Apollo, get inside quickly, try to find some way to save Nicola from the cold.

In a pocket of her Beta-cloth coverall she had a wrench. It was the kind used in the Pacific by Apollo recovery crews. With this, she could undog the hatch from the outside.

It was a little odd working in gravity again, after six years. She didn’t have to brace herself, or the item she was working on; gravity did all that, providing a magical vertical-horizontal reference frame, like an invisible jib.

The hatch swung open. Too easily. So easily that the hull must be breached, or a window smashed. The air of Titan had gotten into Apollo.

She pushed her head into the hatchway; the top of her PLSS caught on the top of the frame.

Immediately, Mott’s head, in its white helmet, was right before her. But Mott didn’t move.

The three couches were almost upside down — at an angle, parallel to Jitterbug’s tilted base. Mott was in the middle couch, unmoving, hanging in her straps. There was Titan slush all over the cabin; it must have forced its way in through a smashed window, a breach in the hull. It had lapped right up, almost to the rim of the hatch. Mott’s face and chest and legs were buried in the slush.

Benacerraf pushed her arms into the slush beneath Mott, almost up to the shoulders. She fumbled for Mott’s restraint clasps; she could feel barely anything through her thick, insulated gloves, and she had to trace the straps down from their anchors, over Mott’s chest, towards her waist.

Her arms and hands were soon very cold. The icy slush of Titan seemed to be sucking the warmth out of her. Well, she thought, this damn moon’s heat capacity can beat out mine any day of the week.

At last she got the clasps loose.

Mott fell forward, into the slurping slush, and Benacerraf’s arms.

Benacerraf managed to get her hands hooked underneath Mott’s shoulders. She began to haul at Mott’s limp body, trying to get it through the hatch. But the orange pressure suit kept catching on the narrow frame, and the gumbo sucked back at her, almost wilfully.

At last Mott came free, her knees and feet clattering against the door frame.

Benacerraf stumbled backwards, falling over into the slush. Mott’s left foot caught in the hatch, and she sprawled grotesquely against the side of the Command Module, her head dipping into the slush.

A cold, deeper than anything Benacerraf had yet experienced, started to work into her back.

She had to get up, or the slush would kill her.

It took a real effort, a haul by her feeble stomach muscles, to pull herself up to a sitting position. She tried to brace herself against the slush, but there was nothing firm to hold onto. She found she had to worm her way around to a crawling position, her arms embedded in the slush up to her elbows, and then drag herself painfully upright. All the time, the mass of the pack on her back threatened to pull her over again.

When she was on her feet again, she was exhausted anew. She looked down at herself. Her arms, legs and much of her chest were smeared with purple-brown gumbo.

She walked back to Mott. She bent and dug her hands under Mott’s shoulders again, and pulled her all the way out onto the ice. Her hands left tholin streaks on Mott’s pressure suit.

She turned Mott over. Mott’s visor was smashed, her helmet full of slush. Benacerraf reached inside and scooped the slush away from Mott’s face. Mott’s eyes were open. Benacerraf tried to push closed the lids, but they were frozen, even the eyeballs hard.

Rosenberg said, “Do you have her?”

“Yes, Rosenberg. I have her.”

Rosenberg fell silent.

There was Titan slush in Mott’s mouth. Benacerraf dug it away with a finger. Her gloved finger seemed too fat for Mott’s mouth; it was like clearing vomit from the mouth of a sick child.

“So,” Rosenberg said. “Then there were three.”

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry, Paula.”

“Me too. Rosenberg, prepare a message for the ground. Her parents…”

“Sure.”

Benacerraf straightened up and returned to Jitterbug. By touch, in a storage compartment behind the head of Mott’s couch, she found a spade, and a little packet of cellophane that contained the Stars-and-Stripes. The spade was broad-bladed, like a snow-shovel. It had a handle that telescoped out. She walked a few yards away from the apex of Jitterbug and began to dig.

The blade penetrated the gumbo easily, and she could lift big shovelfuls away into the thick air. But the stuff clung to the spade and was difficult to shake off. And the walls of the little trench she dug kept collapsing inwards. It was like digging into wet sand.

She kept going, until she was four feet down.

She scraped gumbo off Mott’s chest, exposing the Union Jack sewn there. Then she opened the cellophane packet. She shook out the flag, and laid it over Mott’s body. She wrapped it underneath, making a neat parcel. Now the weak gravity helped her; Mott was feather-light, easy to handle, like a small child.

Two flags, two bodies, she thought.

Benacerraf laid Mott in the trench she had dug.

It was easy to fill. She just pushed the mounds of slush back over the body. The bright orange of Mott’s pressure suit, the brave red and blue and white of the flag, were soon obscured, claimed by the ubiquitous brown of Titan. The clinging stuff oozed quickly back to smoothness.

Benacerraf rested her shovel against the hull of Jitterbug, and stood at the head of Mott’s grave.

“No words this time, Paula?”

“She should have been the first,” Benacerraf said. “Not me. She should have been first… That’s all, I guess.”

Her exhaustion was immense, crushing, beyond anything she had known before. “Paula,” Rosenberg said. “Let’s go open up Discovery.”

“Yes,” she said. Suddenly, standing here in the slush and dark, the idea of the glowing lights of the orbiter’s flight deck — and the cramped, clean confines of the hab module, the warm growing smells of the CELSS farm — seemed welcoming to Benacerraf.

She could see, in the murk, Rosenberg plodding away from Bifrost towards Discovery, the dangling form of Angel limp over his shoulders.

Jackie Benacerraf sat alone on the floor of her lounge, waiting for the pictures of her mother’s first footsteps on Titan.

So far the big softscreen on the wall was blank, save for schematics and timelines and a couple of animated sponsors’ logos. But sound was coming through: traditional astronauts’ voices, distorted and overlaid with pops and crackles, and with a judder imposed by the lousy bandwidth of the compressed signals.

For the record, we have a go for vent… Affirmative, we’re all sealed up. Go for vent…All right.

Jackie couldn’t even tell which voice was her mother’s. There they were, the astronauts, solemnly reporting each step as if working on an unexploded bomb. All for the benefit of those who might follow one day.

But, of course, nobody would. Not ever.

Anyhow, it was hard to concentrate. She was worried about the kids.

She was always worried about the kids.

At least Fred had grown out of his Nullist phase, and he was having some of the image-tattoos removed. That was leaving marks on his skin, but the doctors were saying they shouldn’t be permanent — unlike hers — because he was still young enough. That skin cancer he’d developed when one of the laid-bare patches had been exposed to the sun was more worrying, but again the specialists said it would clear up…

What bothered her more right now was his determination to quit school and go join the Hunter-Gatherers in Central America.

She’d listened to the arguments and lectures until she thought her head would bust open.

The agricultural revolution ten thousand years ago was now pretty much accepted by the academics as a global disaster. So her son told her, anyhow. The archaeology showed the incidence of tooth cavities rose seven-fold; mothers were badly under-nourished; anemia became much more common, and so did tuberculosis… We were better off, ran the argument, so argued Fred, before agriculture. It was true that farming a piece of land could support ten times as many people as the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, but that didn’t buy you much; today there were seven billion people in the world, almost all of whom were worse nourished than their Stone Age ancestors… and so on.

Once, Jackie would have been passionate about such arguments, either for or against. Now, all she cared about was Fred.

The governments cooperating in the Central American park scheme — Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and Belize — had pledged to protect and shelter the young Americans and New Columbians flooding down there to — in theory — rediscover an ancient lifestyle. There was supposed to be no regulation, beyond a simple limit on numbers — but, of course, no communication was possible once you went inside.

Jackie pulled at a tuft of hair. All she could do was keep talking, trying to persuade Fred to think again, to wait, to stick with college…

It was just like the arguments her mother had had with her. Maybe she was doomed to turn into her mother, just as her own kids seemed to be turning into her.

Okay. Everything is go. We are just waiting for the cabin pressure to equalize with the exterior sufficiently to open the hatch…

You ready for your one small step?

Astronaut humor, Jackie thought bleakly.

The irony was, science was making a certain comeback. The environmental problems were becoming so pressing and complex that Maclachlan had reopened some of the university science labs and departments he’d ordered shut down. Even in Seattle, a clear-plastic uv filter over your lawn was now almost as common as a sprinkler system.

It was as if humans were studying the ecology by testing it to destruction, in a kind of huge, one-off, millennial experiment. Maybe when we’ve reduced the whole thing to the grass and the ants, she thought bleakly, we’ll understand how it all used to work.

You’re lined up nicely. Come back towards me… Okay, put your foot down… you’re doing fine… A little more.

It was the plankton crash in the oceans that seemed to be scaring the scientists most. The plankton crisis, it was said, might actually make the planet uninhabitable, ultimately. And in the short term the big problem was the rice crop. There was a blight with an unpronounceable name that was laying waste to rice crops all over the planet. The price of rice in the Seattle stores — particularly Italian rice, for some reason — had gone through the roof. In the longer term, it was said, people would soon be starving, especially in the major rice-producing countries: China, India, Britain.

It was all to be expected, said the doom-mongers. World-wide, humanity got more than fifty percent of its calories from three carbohydrate-rich crops: wheat, rice and maize. Gigantic monocultures, exceptionally vulnerable to disease.

It was all hubris, fourteen-year-old Ben explained to her earnestly. Humanity had been pursuing a gigantic project, the construction of a technosphere, within which the human species could effectively be freed of its dependence on the Earth: isolated, like grandmother in her metal ship, Ben said…

She let him talk. Jackie had a bigger argument to win with Ben. The destiny of the species was a piece of ground she could afford to concede.

Okay, the picture’s good. A little dark and drab maybe, but nothing that a little image processing can’t fix.

Now, at last, the screen filled up. In the foreground Jackie could see what looked like the white-tiled hull of a Command Module, splashed with some kind of mud, and a little further away the ghostly form of an astronaut, a bulky suit topped by a visor that returned brief highlights from the cabin lights. Beyond, no landscape was visible, save only a few yards of what looked like orange-brown swamp.

The astronaut seemed to be pawing at the surface with one foot.

It was, Jackie thought, probably her mother.

The picture was full of digital flaws, rectilinear cross-hatchings and missing pixels, so that you could never forget it was artificial. When the astronaut moved about, so poor was the image quality that she trailed ghosts, pale shadows of limbs and head and torso. It was oddly like the films she’d seen of the first, crude television pictures from Apollo 11, Armstrong and Aldrin moving around like ghosts up there.

I’m in the hatchway. The Command Module has sunk into the surface through several inches, before the slush compacted to stop it. I can’t see any exposed ice…

Still analysing, Jackie thought. Still doing science, even out there, a billion miles from home, one little woman scratching at the surface of a whole world. As if any conclusions she came to made a damn bit of difference.

Still, this wasn’t Apollo 11. Hardly anyone was watching these four-hours-old images. The broadcast, on a minor cable channel, wasn’t exactly illegal, but it also wasn’t encouraged by the authorities either. After all, here were these Americans bounding around in a place the current orthodoxy said didn’t even exist…

What bullshit it all was; what damage space had done to the cause of science, in America and the rest of the world. Twenty-billion-dollar golf shots. Maybe, she thought, we ought to see the space program — not as the culmination of some huge project of science and technology — but as a gigantic, alienating disaster. Maybe if not for the space program, my kids wouldn’t be forced to listen to two-thousand-year-old cosmology every day.

If only it had been done differently: with imagination and daring and style. NASA’s ultimate triumph had been to reduce everything — even the Moon, even Titan — to the dull, the bland, the predictable. But probably, on the other hand, space had made no difference. Jackie was becoming receptive to a thesis put about by some academics now that science and technology had anyway reached the end of their usefulness. Humans were becoming overwhelmed by their own sophisticated machinery, because the intelligence required to build a certain level of technology was less than that needed to survive it. There were endless examples: all the nuclear-industry catastrophes leading up to Chernobyl, her own mother’s Columbia crash, even the new airborne AIDS variant…

Her mind came back to the kids, to Ben, with a wrench. To hell with science, the future of the species, the space program. Who is there to tell you what to say when your fourteen-year-old son comes home and says he wants to get pregnant?

Ben said he was gay. He was in love, with a boy a couple of years older. He wasn’t a virgin any more, he said. And, he said, he wanted a kid.

Of course that was possible now, with cloned foetuses being implanted directly into the stomach wall of a father. It was even safe, they said, more so than natural childbirth.

Jackie argued against it. She had found herself sounding like her own mother again, and she hated it. You’re too young. Wait. Don’t make any decisions now that you can’t unpick later. Finish your education…

But then, she reflected, if it made Ben happy now, maybe she should let him go ahead. Maybe I should just let Fred go too, go seek a better solution in the jungles.

She wasn’t convinced that to plan for a long and happy life was a rational decision any more. In her opinion, you could forget the plankton and the uv; the most likely thing to end it all for them was a bunch of Chinese ICBMs flying over the Pacific.

Sometimes she fell into despair, when she thought about the future her kids were going to have to negotiate. She hated her own lack of control over that future, her impotence in the face of the huge changes sweeping like winds across the planet.

Her mother, moving about in the dense orange atmosphere of Titan, looked less than human. Like some kind of deep-sea fish.

All right. I’m going to step out of Bifrost now.

Jackie leaned forward. This is it, she thought. This is the peak of my mother’s life. Her crowning achievement, her moment in history.

This is the stuff of life, her mother, on Titan, said, and she stuck her hand in the mud.

Oh, God, Mother, I wish you were here.

Rosenberg, suited up, began his daily inspection tour of Tartarus Base. His boots squelched as he dragged them through the icy mud. He walked like an old man, shuffling and huddled over, his helmet lamp splashing yellow light over the glistening slush. He just couldn’t get used to working in this stiff suit, where it took an effort to make the slightest movement, and he was always overcompensating, so that he blundered about like a fool, slamming into equipment and the others, sometimes without even realizing it. Dragging the suit around, in fact, even without attempting anything constructive, was as hard work as shovelling snow, or climbing a ladder on Earth.

But he liked the feeling of being embedded in a gravity field once more, after all those zero-G years. He felt as if he was somewhere. Oddly, it made him feel less lonesome.

The Base was, if he cared to be charitable about it, looking a little more like a permanent encampment now, and less like a couple of crashed spacecraft.

He walked around the Shuttle orbiter. It looked like a bulky, downed aircraft, all of a hundred and twenty feet long, its cut-down delta wings ploughed into the gumbo. The trail it had dug on landing still stretched off behind it, into the murk that concealed the horizon. But slowly, that shallow valley was filling in: the gumbo was relaxing, seeping back into the trench. Rosenberg had installed markers — just bits of aluminum and plastic from the wreck of Jitterbug — at various points along the valley floor and walls; the creep ought to give him a good understanding of the viscous and mechanical properties of the gumbo.

He stepped up onto the left wing. There was gumbo coating the upper surface of the wing, thrown up there by the landing, and a more uniform coating from the tholin drizzle since. But it was a thin layer, and Rosenberg found it a relief to step onto this hard surface, after a few minutes on the uniform gloopy mess that was Titan’s ground.

The orbiter’s payload bay doors were open, resting on the wings, like folded-back pieces of the hull. After the landings, the crew had discovered the doors had gotten stuck, and they had to be cranked open by hand. Now Rosenberg clambered up onto the curved inner surface of the payload bay door and, his feet clattering, walked along the sixty-feet length of the cargo bay, inspecting its contents. The payload bay wasn’t completely exposed to the elements of Titan. They had rigged up a crude canopy, of parachute fabric on aluminum struts, over the bay, like a tent; the centrifuge arm held it up to some extent. The canopy caught the worst of the tholin drift, but it was already sagging under the accumulated weight. Some day he was going to have to get up there and knock the crap off, like a suburban home-owner clearing snow from his roof.

The bay was equipped as it had been during the cruise to Saturn, with the big hab module closest to the orbiter flight deck, and then a short crawl-through tunnel to the reworked Spacelab module that had housed the CELSS farm. Behind the Spacelab lay the Topaz reactors, beneath their heavy shielding. The centrifuge cabin on its big swing arm lay across the top of all this, abandoned now. Its dismantling was on Rosenberg’s long list of things to do; that big motor ought to be useful for something.

Rosenberg jumped off the wing. Briefly, he enjoyed the childlike sensation of drifting down as slow as a snowflake in Titan’s feeble gravity, and settling gently into the slush.

Then he ploughed his way across the gumbo to the nose of the orbiter.

The upper surface of the orbiter’s flight deck, the white felt thermal tiles there, was streaked and stained by tholin gunge. Discovery looked battered, aged, as if the mushy landscape of Titan were dragging it down into terminal entropy. But if he bent down and looked underneath the chin of the orbiter, at the black thermal protection tiles sheltered there, he could still make out the scorching of entry. This had once been a spacecraft, after all, and here it still showed. Even if the payload bay had been turned into a shanty town.

But at that, he reflected, this was surely a better fate for Discovery than to have finished up as a museum piece on the lawn of some fading NASA center.

Later he was going to have to run an internal check on Discovery’s systems. They were having some trouble with balky heaters. Fixed heaters had been installed throughout the orbiter’s hull, to help insulate the life-bearing hab module at its heart. The heaters responded to commands from the command software and temperature sensors. There were also small radioisotope heating units, mounted on moveable mechanisms, that could vary the heat applied to particularly cold areas.

But the heaters ate up a lot of power. Rosenberg had ideas on how they could coat the Base’s main components — the orbiter, Bifrost — with blocks of water ice, like igloos. That would retain a lot of heat, and enable them to reduce the power output from the Topaz reactors, so extending their life. Maybe they could build airtight tunnels between the components to give themselves more space, maybe even put up independent igloos, sealed somehow…

Of course such grandiose schemes depended on getting access to water ice, which was proving a difficulty, on this ice moon. The problem was the tholin slush. As far as Rosenberg could tell they were sitting on top of a gumbo layer at least fifteen yards thick; as far as they’d dug, they hadn’t reached bedrock water ice.

When he looked up at the lighted windows of the orbiter’s flight deck, he thought he could see the blind face of Bill Angel. But the glass was obscured by purple stripes of tholin, and it was hard to be sure.

He walked over the gumbo the fifty feet to where they had dragged Bifrost, their intact Apollo Command Module. Using components from Jitterbug, they had fixed up a crude airlock over Bifrost’s side hatch. Power cables stretched from Discovery, through the slush, to the Apollo. Rosenberg had rigged up the CELSS farm in Bifrost, after stripping out the couches and other moveable gear. That had given the crew in Discovery the extra living space of the old Spacelab module.

Fifty feet further on from Bifrost was a small pile of gear, covered by another hunk of parachute fabric. This was salvage from Jitterbug, disassembled and hauled laboriously across the tholin by Rosenberg and Benacerraf. The shell of Jitterbug still lay in the gumbo where it had come down, its base and chunks of its hull chopped away, the improvised grave of Nicola Mott close by.

Rosenberg had developed a habit of peering under the stiffening fabric over the gear pile every day. He did it now. It was a waste of time, of course. He was on a lifeless world, here: there were no thieves to disturb the pile, no rats or dogs who would chew the tarpaulin. And there never would be, as long as he lived.

He walked on.

The closeness of the horizon, his immersion in this perpetual murk, made it seem as if he was stuck inside the close walls of some opaque orange bubble. Some deep part of his brain, he suspected, still believed that things must be different a little further away: a few miles from the camp, maybe over Titan’s close horizon. Some place where there were all the elements he had grown up with: people and animals and buildings and cars, and a blue sky with white, fluffy clouds…

But it wasn’t true.

It was an odd thing, a small detail, but to Rosenberg the lack of disturbance to the equipment piles emphasized their isolation on this lifeless moon more than any amount of theorizing.

Benacerraf and Rosenberg, cleaned up, sat on the flight deck of Discovery — away from Bill Angel — and chewed the fat about equipment problems.

What they were really doing, of course, was not talking about Bill.

Rosenberg was suspicious of Angel, on some deep level. Bill seemed to have stabilized since the landing, as the NASA psychologists had suggested he would. But Rosenberg didn’t think the creature in the hab module was Bill Angel any more. The way he talked, the body language… He seemed to be coming in at an angle to the rest of the world. As if his head was stuck in some fourth dimension.

Benacerraf shut Rosenberg up when he talked like this. How come scientists are so precise and picky about their specialisms, but always prepared to bullshit about stuff they know nothing about, like psychology? As far as she was concerned this situation wasn’t about trust; it was about management. Benacerraf approved of Rosenberg’s plans for their survival. But to achieve those plans they were going to need resources: time, muscle power, intellectual energy. She wasn’t convinced that the two of them, alone, were sufficient. She thought they needed Bill Angel to close the design. If they were going to survive here, they had to manage all their resources effectively. And that included Angel. She saw it as her job to manage Bill, the way they were going to have to manage other pieces of equipment, balky or otherwise.

So now Rosenberg sat here and spoke, not about Bill, but about the Sabatier unit. The Sabatier was a simple piece of kit, basically a pipe surrounded by nichrome heaters. The Sabatier cracked carbon dioxide, collected from the life support system, by reacting it at high temperatures with hydrogen, in the presence of a ruthenium catalyst, to produce methane and water. The water was collected in a condenser coil, and the methane was vented to Titan’s air.

“I think the catalyst is being poisoned by a build-up of amine vapors… The trouble must be further upstream, in the process, at the SAWD.” The solid amine water desorption unit removed carbon dioxide from the air by passing it over beads of resin inside steel canisters. Rosenberg started to list the steps he was taking to test this out. He said, “At least the systems are easier to work with, now we have a little more space to move around in. And every damn component doesn’t float off into the air every time you turn around…”

And so on, a parade of detail.

Benacerraf was chewing on a spindly carrot from the CELSS farm. “Rosenberg, how are we doing overall? What else do we need to do, that we’re not doing?”

He clasped his hands behind his head, and rocked back in his seat. “Let’s go back to basics. During the cruise, where we had to rely on nothing but the resources we carried, we tried to close all the life support loops. We recycled all our waste, solid and liquid, and fed nutrients to the plants we grew, and cleaned the air… We did well; we survived six years in interplanetary space. But even so the closure was never perfect; we lost about five percent of most materials as they passed around the life support cycle, to leakage, unrecoverable waste, whatever.

“Here on Titan, outside resources are available to us: water, in the form of bedrock ice, nitrogen and methane from the air, hydrocarbons — like the ethane and propane we can get from Clear Lake — and other compounds, like nitriles and ammonia. That means we can open up some of the loops.”

Benacerraf said, “Water. We’re still recycling every drop we drink. I can taste the six-year-old piss in it, for God’s sake.”

“If we could bring fresh water ice into the system we’d cut down the bulk we’re recycling by forty-five percent. And that would give us a system much better buffered against instabilities.”

“We’re going to have to climb that damn mountain, aren’t we?”

“It’s why we chose to land here, Paula.”

She held her hands up. “I know. It’s just that mountaineering on Titan seems a much dumber idea down here than it did from orbit. What else? What about all those amino acids you say we need?”

Rosenberg scratched his head. “Well, that’s the hole I can’t plug right now. We’ve taken a lot of samples from the air, the diolin slush. No aminos; all I’ve found is the prebiotic organic stuff I expected. If we’re not to be resupplied, there are some trace elements we need as well.”

“So what are the options?”

“We go seek aminos on the surface. Some place we haven’t looked.”

“Like where?”

“The bottom of Clear Lake. Or carbonaceous chondrite craters,” he said.

She turned, looking irritated. “I hate having to ask you to explain all the time, Rosenberg.”

He shrugged. “Then read up. Carbonaceous chondrites are a kind of asteroid. Cratering bodies in this neck of the woods come in four main groups. There are a lot of icy bodies: loose stuff like comet heads, maybe disintegrated moons. Then the M-type asteroids are metallic, metal-rich and dense. The S-types are silicaceous. Rocky. And the C-types are the carbonaceous chondrites. Water, iron, stone and carbon. If we find a carbonaceous chondrite crater we might find kerogen.”

“What’s that?”

“A hydrocarbon. A tarry stuff you find in oil shales. It contains carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, sulphur, potassium, chlorine, other elements…” He smiled. “It’s the nearest thing to a nutritional broth we’re likely to find out here. Mom’s condensed primordial soup.

You know, we can reach a lot of craters with the skimmer, when we set it up,”

“All right. When we fix the skimmer, we’ll discuss it. What else?”

What else, what else…

As the session went on, Rosenberg started to feel hunted, as if everything was coming back to him. Questions, questions. What if he got an answer wrong? It is too much for one person, he thought, this responsibility for all our lives.

But he did his best to answer Paula’s questions.

When Paula had gone, he stayed in his seat and stared out into Titan’s twilit gloom.

Benacerraf felt pressured as well, of course. Rosenberg just came up with options; Benacerraf had to make decisions about them.

But all the time they were skirting around the biggest issues. There was the problem of Angel, for one thing. And the real limiting factor to their chances of survival, here on Titan: not water, not amino acids, but energy.

The run-down of the Topaz suite was the final limiting factor, even if they could bridge all the other gaps in the loops. When the power faded below some critical threshold, the cold was going to get them at last.

Rosenberg had no plans, no ideas, how to get over that.

Rosenberg was the smartest person on the whole damn moon. If he couldn’t figure a way out of this, nobody was going to. And then he would die. And not at some remote, far-future date, but here, on this crappy moon, and soon. All of this — the orbiter, Apollo, their neat little gadgets and improvised tools — all of it would still be here, but his spark of consciousness, his unique self, would be gone. It would be like a shell, slowly decaying, presumably buried for good in the drifting slush in a couple of hundred years. Eventually, there would be no sign he’d even existed.

That was unbearable to Rosenberg. He’d come here, in some vague way, to find the future, to find answers, to do science. To escape Earth. But now, this. There had to be a way out of this trap, the abandonment by NASA, the dwindling resources, the cold…

Beyond the tholin-streaked windows of the flight deck, the gloomy slush-covered ground of Titan stretched off to an orange-stained, concealed horizon. In all the world that Rosenberg could see, under a brown-black lid of a cloudy sky, only a handful of human artifacts — the bundles of equipment under yellow parachute fabric, the stained white conical walls of Bifrost — showed any color other than the universal murky orange-brown.

He closed his eyes, for a few seconds.

Then he got up, and went back to work.

Later, Rosenberg went out again, to help Benacerraf in her efforts to deploy the skimmer.

The skimmer — properly, the TGEV, the Titan Ground Effect Vehicle — was a fifty-million-dollar improvisation, put together by Boeing, at Seattle, in under eighteen months. Right now it was still folded up in its palette on the side of the orbiter like a construction toy. Benacerraf had it halfway out, like an aluminum dragonfly struggling to emerge from its chrysalis. Rosenberg helped her haul on the lanyards.

Abruptly the main fuselage sections locked, and four legs popped out at the corners, telescopic tubes with wide orange footpads. With a couple more hauls, they had the skimmer unfolded, and set upright on the surface.

Rosenberg — sweating inside his suit, pulled muscles aching — walked slowly around the craft.

Sitting on its spidery legs the skimmer was a spindly, open-frame box built around a ducted fan, with a skirt of flexible metal mesh draped around its base. The fan’s housing curved upwards above the center of the craft, a shaped funnel. There were two metal-framed couches in front of the fan, each big enough to accommodate a suited crew member, and there was a simple control box with a joystick in front of the left-hand seat.

Inside the fan housing there was a rotor blade, designed to push the thick Titan air down through the duct and into the skirt, so providing the hovercraft effect that would lift the skimmer off the ground. The fan was run off series-wound electric motors, powered by two big silver-zinc batteries that could be recharged from the Topaz.

The frame was shaved-thin aluminum, to save weight. The skimmer carried its own navigation computer, communications system and cargo space for maps, samples, tool-racks, spare battery. There was even a fold-out tent, so that astronauts could spend a night away from Discovery on an extended EVA.

It was a sophisticated piece of equipment. But the skimmer, with its umbrella antennae and fold-up seats, looked in the light of his helmet lamp as if it had come out of someone’s hobby shop. Like some backyard Victorian inventor’s dream of space travel.

With her hand in Rosenberg’s, Benacerraf climbed up into the left hand seat. She was maybe four feet off the ground; the duct mouth flared above her like a huge crown. She dug a reference card out of a slip pocket, and began throwing switches.

Suddenly bulbs sparkled over the framework, green and red and white, with big, down-pointing floods that splashed light over the gumbo.

“Wow,” said Rosenberg. “It looks like a Christmas tree.”

Benacerraf said, “I think—”

There was a noise from the duct, a whump-whump that carried easily to Rosenberg through the thick air. Rapidly, the rotor increased its speed, and the noise smoothed out to a whir.

From beneath the skirt, a thin sheet of gumbo blasted out across the ground in all directions. It was like a paint-sprayer; it took only seconds for Rosenberg’s legs, almost up to his waist, to be coated in crap.

“How about that,” Benacerraf called.

Rosenberg shouted, “If you’re going to lift that thing, Paula, strap in.”

Benacerraf began fumbling at the restraints at her waist.

The whir rose in pitch to a thin whine, and the skimmer shuddered. It lifted off the ground, the skirt billowing beneath it. Benacerraf whooped, and Rosenberg applauded.

If it worked, the skimmer would extend their range of operations hugely. Any kind of surface car was going to be impractical, given the stiffness of the tholin slush. But the ground effect vehicle idea might have been made for Titan, with its low gravity, all this lovely thick air… The best way to get around in these conditions.

Except for human-powered flight on Leonardo wings, of course. But that was a little beyond the imagination of NASA.

The skimmer hung with its four footpads suspended about a yard off the ground. Rosenberg thought he could see the murky Titanian air being sucked into the mouth of the duct, particles of aerosol crud marking the airflow. The central duct jerked this way and that, blasting its jet of air for directional control. There wasn’t much sophistication in controlling the craft; you swivelled the ducted fan, taking care not to disrupt the air cushion that held the whole thing up, and went where the downward blast took you…

But now the skimmer was wobbling from side to side, as if suspended from an invisible wire. Benacerraf was wrestling with the joystick. “It handles like shit,” she called. “It’s nothing like the training vehicle at Ellington. This is completely unstable. I can feel it. It feels as if it’s about to—”

Abruptly the front of the skimmer tipped upwards, and the skirt lifted clear of the ground. A great gush of gumbo came fountaining out from beneath the skimmer, falling in slow, complex arcs back to the ground. With its cushion of air lost, the skimmer slipped backwards, its rear two legs slamming into the ground.

Benacerraf worked to kill the fan, and the skimmer tipped forward, settling at last on all four legs.

The skimmer looked like an ungainly meteorite, fallen to ground at the center of a great radial splash of churned-up gumbo.

As the fan noise died, Rosenberg stepped forward. He checked Benacerraf was okay, and they started to talk about ways to gain control of the stability.

They kept trying. Benacerraf kept taking the skimmer up, until the batteries started to flatten. They didn’t manage to get the skimmer to fly more than five yards before, every time, it veered off course and dug itself into the gumbo like a badly thrown frisbee.

Rosenberg had a deep, pessimistic sense they were wasting their time. The design of the craft looked all wrong to him: its center of gravity much too high, the air cushion the wrong shape. With a ground-effect vehicle stability depended on the design of the air cushion, aerodynamic guidance. The Boeing people had done their best, but they just hadn’t had the time or facilities to test out their models of how the thing was going to behave in Titan conditions: the air density, the temperature structure, the gravity.

The skimmer was a wipe-out. And that meant that wherever they went, they were going to have to foot-slog it. They’d travelled a billion miles, and now they were here they could go no further than they could walk.

Their options had suddenly closed in even further.

He’d been out a long time; he was tired. He went to the airlock.

Once inside and de-suited he started to clean off the gumbo still sticking to his EMU.

Fifty million bucks, he thought.

On the day of the funeral of Chen Tong, Jiang Ling arrived early at Tiananmen Square.

She stepped out of her hotel onto the Avenue of Eternal Peace. She walked west under the canopy of sycamore trees, just budding, that fringed the bright red wall of the Forbidden City. The sky was suffused with a pearl grey.

She reached the end of the sidewalk, and stepped forward onto a checkerboard of cement paving stones. The place was all but deserted. She walked to the center, her footsteps clicking loudly.

The vastness of the Square swept away around her, like a frozen sea of stone.

She turned, and looked around the frieze of monumental architecture that lined the hundred acres of the Square: the museums to the east, the Great Hall of the People to the west, Mao’s mausoleum to the south. And at the very center of the Square there was the Monument to the Martyrs of the People, a granite obelisk inscribed in Mao’s own hand with the epigram Eternal Glory to the People’s Heroes.

And to the north there was Tiananmen itself: the Gate of Heavenly Peace, leading into the ancient Forbidden City. The Gate was a ten-storey rampart set in the massive walls of the Forbidden City; it was painted imperial maroon, capped by two tiers of sloping yellow-tiled roofs, the colors still washed out by the dawn grey. Five portals ran through the base of the Gate, and just above — flanked by inscriptions saying Long Live the Unity of the Peoples of the World and Long Live the People’s Republic of China — sat the massive, familiar portrait of Mao Zedong. The gigantic softscreen image, responding to her presence, appeared to look down on her and smile in welcome. Something inside her melted. On the screen, a blue sky, fluffy with clouds, blossomed into view behind Mao’s corpulent face.

Her memories never did justice to this place, she thought. Photographs had a way of making the Square seem as flat and uninspiring as the endless shopping malls and parking lots she had seen in America. But this was the Square: the largest public quadrangle in the world, the center of the country’s center — the north star, as Confucius would have said, to which all other stars are attracted. Standing here she was overwhelmed by the physical size of her nation, the history embedded in the ground on which she walked. And she was touched by her own significance, as the first astronaut, her role in the millennial extension of tianming, the Mandate of Heaven.

This was, she believed, a sense of oneness which no Westerner could understand: certainly not the Americans, with their endlessly recycled images of the Tiananmen students of 1989, those unfortunate, misguided wretches with their Western clothes and English-language banners.

This was China, after all: for all its faults and problems, founded on a billion souls, five millennia of history; this could never be America.

And today, it was promised, she would meet the Great Helmsman himself. Her heart thumped as it had not when, during her endless tours, she had shaken the hands of presidents and kings. Perhaps, today, she would at last be released from the burden of her ceremonial duties, and permitted to return to what she loved: to fly, to sample again the light-filled glories of spaceflight.

With hope and expectation, she walked forward towards the Great Hall of the People. The early morning cold dug through the layers of her light Mao suit, but soon the sun would rise, and pour orange light and warmth into the remote corners of the Square.

She entered the grandiose gloom of the Hall itself. This was a true monument of socialist architecture, all of a thousand feet long, room enough to seat five thousand banqueting guests. And today, under the glare of TV lights, the focus of all this immense volume was the wizened body of a very old man, which lay draped in a Chinese flag, under a crystal sarcophagus. There was a sea of Party leaders, almost all of them men, lapping in orderly waves in their dark Mao suits around the glittering coffin. Jiang took her place in line, alongside her mentor Xu Shiyou.

Sandwiched between two octogenarian Party stalwarts from the provinces, they filed forward slowly towards the coffin. On a small stage a senior official was intoning a long, lugubrious eulogy over Chen Tong — a celebration of his glorious career, which stretched back to service with Mao himself before 1949 — and the Party grandees, one by one, reached the sarcophagus and bowed three times, and then each of them passed on to Chen’s widow and shook her withered old hand. Thus Jiang Ling found herself adrift in the sea of old men.

Many of them were wearing elaborate hearing aids and softscreen spectacles. Some of them were relatively spry, but others were supported by younger people — secretaries, or perhaps nurses — and they shuffled their feet, hardly able to walk. A few of them were even in wheelchairs, laden with oxygen bottles. And yet many had bizarre marks of youth: thick black hair, smoothed skin, sparkling new eyes. One of them — a few places ahead of her in the line — walked stiffly, and with a whir of servomotors, as some rudimentary exoskeleton beneath his Mao suit propelled him forward.

Jiang was startled and repelled. She had had much contact with the leadership since her flight, but always in meetings with one or two officials at a time; never had she witnessed the leadership en masse in this fashion. She wondered what tonnage of transplanted organs, bones, body fluids — manufactured, or excavated from youthful cadavers — had been installed in this crumbling leadership, to maintain its semblance of forward motion and life. Surely, she thought, nowhere in the world was there a government leadership so visibly tired and aged as the one arrayed around Chen’s corpse this morning.

At last she reached the corpse, and she stared, with little understanding, at the smooth, embalmed face of Chen Tong.

Now the eulogy was done. The vacated platform was taken by a fat middle-aged man in an off-white Mao suit, fitted with the elaborate collar of an imperial-era Confucian scholar. He was Gao Feng, a singer who had been popular two decades ago.

Xu Shiyou leaned close to her and whispered, his skin smelling of Western cosmetics: “Perhaps Chen Tong was a fan of Gao.”

The singer began to croon: We all have a family whose name is China…

There was a sharp, cloying smell, unwelcome in the stuffy air.

Jiang turned. The elderly Party leader behind her, his face imploded, was leaning on the arm of his aide and staring down at his trousers, from which leaked a slow rivulet of yellow fluid.

Now that the ceremonial was over, the leaders lingered, talking in small groups, their various attendants standing by impassively. It was an occasion without parallel in the West; there were no refreshments — no drinks, even — and no real focus to the gathering. But she could see, from the intensity of body language, the fierceness of expressions, that much business was being transacted here, between these rulers of the far-flung provinces of China.

Xu Shiyou drew Jiang Ling aside. “The Helmsman wishes to meet you, shortly. Now listen to me, Jiang Ling.”

She grimaced. “I always do, Xu.”

He snorted through his fleshy nose. “If only that were true. But listen now, Jiang, if never again; for this could be the most important moment of your life.”

“You say that,” she said, “to a woman who has flown in space?”

“I do,” he said seriously.

Xu continued to rise in the leadership, in part — she knew — thanks to the connection with herself, which he had been assiduous in maintaining and exploiting, and in part thanks to his own untiring efforts on his own behalf.

Xu had joined the Communist Party in his teens. He had been an electrical engineer, and had worked as a factory administrator for fifteen years, before starting to work his way through the ranks in various economic and diplomatic agencies. He was cultivated, able to chat freely in any of his three languages — Russian, Romanian and English — and, Jiang had observed for herself, he was able to charm and surprise many of those he encountered with his education and facility. He could recite lines from the U.S. Declaration of Independence as easily as verses of T’ang dynasty poetry.

Jiang would not admit to liking Xu Shiyou. Still less did she regard him as worthy of her trust. But she had come to understand, with a cynical analysis that surprised herself, that as long as she did nothing to tarnish her image as a new demi-god, his interests were identical to hers. Therefore, she decided, he was an ally…

So she said, “Give me your advice, Xu Shiyou.”

“Whatever the Helmsman says to you, you must endeavor to see the world through his eyes. You must suffer with him, sense his fears.”

“His fears?”

“Remember this: the Helmsman was born in 1904. Eleven decades ago: think of all he has seen, and suffered, in those years, his long and hard life matching the tortured history of our country. When the Helmsman came of age, China was a mere dish of loose sand, as Sun Yat-sen said: hopelessly divided by warlordism and chronic social disorder. There is, embedded deep in the bones of these, our senior leaders, a fear of falling back into such a state of humiliation and disunity.

“And now, in the twilight of his long life, the Helmsman faces chaos once more,” Xu said solemnly. “It is no secret that our losses in the attempt to liberate Taiwan were monstrous… And it is, of course, the peasants in the hinterland who suffered most. It is said that every family in China lost a son or daughter on the beaches of Taiwan. True or not, that has become a symbol, provoking unrest in the provinces.

“The answer to all this, of course,” said Xu, “is economic growth. Expansion. But we are contained, by the Americans and their allies. Our technology cannot match theirs. The puppet allies ring us, their satellites watch over us. And hence any conflict in the future like the Taiwan war must, inevitably, end in defeat for us.

“We must face stark facts. Every effort has been made to maintain ample food and decent housing. But the peasants have little spare income, little choice. The farmers see their cousins in the city acquiring private phone lines, houses, cars, softscreens, image-tattoos… And meanwhile, all the forecasts predict a worsening of the lot of the peasants, as new diseases spread, as even the water supplies shrivel…

“We are becoming desperate.”

“And it is the fault of the West.”

“Yes,” he said. “The West remains corrupt, increasingly decadent, and must ultimately rot from within…”

“Yes,” she said. In fact she did agree; based on her own observation, she believed this to be true.

“But when we face the West, Jiang, we face a lunatic; a lunatic more powerful than we are, who cripples us with his threat. What we must do is strike at him — hard, a single blow, which will remove his dominance — perhaps for all time.”

That confused her. “What do you mean?”

“We must seek a single hammer blow, which might change the shape of human destiny for ten thousand years… And that is what the Helmsman will say to you.”

An attendant came to call them forward. The Great Helmsman was ready to receive them.

“Be ready, Jiang Ling,” Xu said softly. “Be open.”

She approached, fear and fascination mixed in equal part.

He was a wisp of a man, she thought, a dried-out husk of a man, overwhelmed by the bulky technology of his wheelchair. She saw medical equipment, discreet, unlabelled black boxes, tucked into the frame of the chair, pipes and tubes snaking up into the Helmsman’s clothing. And she thought she could detect the liquid bulk of a colostomy bag under his jacket. A middle-aged woman, dumpy and plain — perhaps one of his daughters — stood at his side, her plump hand protectively on his thin shoulder. Occasionally, as the leaders paid their obeisance, he would react — nod, shake his head, stare — and the companion would lean, bringing her face closer to his, evidently attempting to decipher his meaning.

Jiang was called to approach. She did so, feeling still more nervous than the day she had been called to enter the first space capsule.

He lifted his head. The eyes in that battered face seemed to fix on her. His mouth worked, wordless.

The daughter began to intone, as if resuming a speech suspended halfway through. Without addressing Jiang directly, she spoke of the crimes of the United States, of atrocities committed during the recent conflict against hapless Chinese servicemen on the beaches of Taiwan. The people of the United States were foreign devils, of the type who had raped China repeatedly in the past. And they did not act alone, but in cooperation with their allies — even with their old foe Russia, even with the new young states which had budded off the corpse of the U.S., and which competed with it in other arenas. The world, it seemed, was polarized: China stood alone, ringed by her enemies, and it was ever thus…

Now the Helmsman tipped forward, as if rocking. He spoke, and his voice was faint, as if coming from far away.

“Jiang Ling. I dream I am at home, in my villa here in Beijing, with my family and associates. News arrives. On the fringe of the city, there is an odd outbreak of a respiratory disease. Hundreds of citizens present themselves to the hospitals gasping for breath. The first symptoms include vomiting, fever, a choking cough and labored breathing. Antibiotics appear to contain the disease. Without antibiotics, death from hemorrhage, respiratory failure or toxic shock follows in a few days. It kills more than ninety percent of its victims. The doctors struggle to diagnose this bizarre, unusual illness.

“People start to die, in large numbers.

“At last the doctors understand. The disease is spread by spores — spores polluting the air of the city, thousands of them entering the lungs with every breath — and the spores cross the lining of the lungs and travel to the lymph nodes, where they germinate, multiply and spread to other tissues, releasing toxins as they go.

“Public health officials try to understand where the spores come from and which direction they are spreading. But this takes time; and we have no more time. Rumors begin to spread that supplies of antibiotics have run out.

“Other rumors state that only some racial groups are affected by the disease: specifically, Han.

“I appear on softscreens, in Beijing and across the nation, and I caution against panic. But then news is brought to me that even my family has been exposed, even myself…”

He seemed to be looking at her, but his eyes were so vague and discolored she could not be certain. “Jiang Ling, I am describing an attack by the anthrax bacillus — or rather, a strain of it genetically engineered to strike at specific population groups. My advisers inform me that it would take a mere two hundred pounds of spores to destroy three million people in a city like this. And, my advisers say, such gruesome weapons are even now under preparation for use against us in secret laboratories in the United States…”

Jiang, horrified, thought of the America she had glimpsed: large, complex, confused, fragmenting, frightened. And she thought of some of the Western leaders she had met, for instance the chilling General Hartle: a grisly mirror image of the Helmsman, another old man clinging to the levers of power, continually reenacting the paranoia of his youth.

Was such scheming possible there?

Yes, she decided.

“But,” she asked, “what is my assignment, sir?”

The Great Helmsman lifted his hand, his bony wrist protruding from the soft fabric of his Mao suit, his fingers thin as dried twigs, and he beckoned to her.

She stepped forward and, encouraged by the Helmsman’s daughter, she leaned down and placed her face close to his. Close up, his skin did not have the alien texture she had perceived from a greater distance; it was clearly human, but brown with age, as brown as the earth, and riven with wrinkles and cracks, distended pores like the craters of the Moon. She had an impulse to reach out and touch it, to feel the faint warmth which must still pump beneath that battered surface.

His eyes, embedded in their black sockets, were like pearls, grey, moist, formless. His breath smelt, oddly, of milk.

“Yingzhen zhike,” he said. “Poisonous wine. We must drink poisonous wine to slake our thirst. That is your assignment, Jiang Ling. You must sip the wine, now, for all of us…”

His voice was as dry, she thought, as the scratch of a leaf along the bed of an ancient Martian canal.

Benacerraf was standing on a shallow, undulating beach. Overhead, grey-brown methane cumulus clouds crowded the sky.

The black meniscus of Clear Lake, flat and still, swept all the way to a horizon that was nearby and sharply curving, dimly obscured by the continuous, burnt-orange drizzle of organic sediment. To left and right, Benacerraf could make out the mountainous walls of the enclosing crater, like lines of steep, irregular hillocks, their erosion channels stained by gumbo streaks, their profiles softened by the slow relaxation of the bedrock ice. Under the uniform orange glow which suffused everything, the lake’s liquid ethane sat like a basinful of crude oil, thirty miles across.

The lighting — orange above, black below — and the sharp curvature of this small world were disconcerting. It was as if she was looking through a fish-eye lens, like the Apollo periscope, which made the ground bulge upwards towards her, distorted by a rendering in false colors.

She wondered how long it would take for the lack of blue and green in this landscape to drive her crazy.

Rosenberg had been hoping that they might find the tholin washed away, exposing a rim of bedrock water ice, reasonably accessible. It hadn’t worked out that way. These ancient, frozen coastlines were eroded by the slow action of waves — in fact Benacerraf could see some evidence of wave action; at the very edge of the liquid there were parallel streaks of crusty, foamy deposit, like the debris of some industrial pollutant, washed up over the raw tholin — but the drizzle of tholins from the air evidently fell more thickly than the waves could wash them away.

This was really just a down-sloping extension of the sludgy gumbo-coated icescape she’d become used to, the purple-brown sheen of tholin continuing all the way to the edge of the ethane lake and beyond.

And yet this was, nevertheless, a beach: one in its morphology with that other beach at Canaveral, a billion miles away, from which she had launched. And there was the same air of disjointedness she had noticed at beaches on Earth — at the interface between two different media, the sea and the land, where erosion and decay worked to reduce mountains and cliffs to a uniform, muddy mediocrity.

And besides, she thought, maybe this wasn’t so unearthly after all. A few billion years back — give or take a couple of hundred degrees — it mightn’t have been so different to stand on the beaches of primeval Earth, to look out on a similar ocean of sludgy, prebiotic organic soup. It was on a beach like this, she thought, that some proto-amphibian ancestor of mine first crawled out. She had come full circle.

Rosenberg touched her shoulder; she could barely feel the weight of his hand through the layers of her suit. “Weather forecast for all you nautical types,” he said. “Haze.”

“Funny, Rosenberg.”

“So. You ready to go?”

Ready, she thought, to go sailing: on a horseshoe-shaped lake of paraffin, for all the world like a character in an Edward Lear poem. I want to be back in Seattle.

She padded back up the shallow slope of the beach to the boat. She was wearing snowshoes, as they called them: big curving plates of Command Module hull metal, strapped to her blue boots. The snowshoes kept her pretty much on top of the sticky gumbo. She had worked out a way of walking that involved sliding the snowshoes forward first, as if scraping mud off the soles, to free them of the clinging gumbo.

The “boat” was simply the base of Mott’s Command Module, Jitterbug. Benacerraf and Rosenberg had cut away the external shell of the double-skinned Module a couple of feet above the rounded lip of the heatshield. What they ended up with was a round, shallow bowl with a turned-up rim, something like a big dog-food dish, thirteen feet across. The orifices which had once contained the nozzles of reaction control engines were round, gaping wounds in the shallow walls. Rosenberg had plugged all but one of these; to the last he had fixed a steel cable. Atmospheric entry scorch marks still spread from the heatshield lip up and over the low walls of the boat. The wall had been etched with a scale, gradations inches apart, so they could measure the draft of the boat in Clear Lake. Its interior was cluttered up with the equipment Benacerraf was going to need, out on the ethane.

Building the boat — designing it in the relative warmth of the hab module, cutting and shaping the base of Jitterbug — had actually been fun, in a home-workshop kind of way. Working those hours with Rosenberg, most of them in a companionable silence, had been among the happiest Benacerraf had known since leaving Earth. For once in this mission they’d had a finite, well-defined goal, and the means to achieve it.

But now, that they’d hauled the thing down here to the lake, it looked absurd, flimsy, a lashed-up improvisation. Which, of course, it was.

Benacerraf lined up with Rosenberg behind the boat. In her multilayer suit it was difficult to bend, and she struggled to close her thick gloves around the half-inch-thick rim of the boat’s wall. But when they overcame the friction of the gumbo and got up a little momentum, the boat coasted easily down the beach.

The boat slid into the ethane without a splash, and came to rest a couple of feet from the edge of the beach. It bobbed, eerily slowly, and concentric oily swells rippled away from its circumference, fat and massive.

Now Rosenberg wrapped the end of the boat’s steel mooring cable around his waist, and stepped back a few yards from the ethane’s edge. He kicked off his snowshoes and let himself sink into the gumbo, anchoring himself there. “Okay, Paula. I’ll pull you back at the first sign of trouble. The shallows should be okay, but that boat won’t be able to withstand any problems in deeper water. I mean, ethane. And, Paula. Whatever you do, don’t fall in. Don’t even sit down. That ethane lake has a much bigger heat capacity than your ass, it will give you one cosmic case of hemorrhoids…”

“I’ll bear it in mind, Rosenberg.”

She took off her snowshoes, and lifted them carefully back up the beach. Then she hauled on the cable to pull the boat a little closer to the shoreline, to minimize the ethane wading she would have to do.

She stumbled through the shallow ethane to the boat. As fast as she walked, the stabbing cold of the liquid pierced the multiple layers of her heated boots.

She stepped over the boat’s foot-high wall, and moved to the center of the boat. The little vessel rocked back and forth with slow grandeur, and she could hear a slow, sombre sloshing from the liquid around its hull.

She looked down at her feet. Droplets of ethane fizzed as they boiled away from her boots. The rocking steadied, slowly.

Rosenberg was climbing further back up the beach, stepping backwards, making sure his footing in the slush was secure. He sent waves rippling up and down the steel cable. The cable moved with languorous, snakelike grace in the low gravity; but it sliced through the low-density ethane liquid as if it wasn’t there. And where the cable penetrated the liquid Benacerraf could see a puncture in the heavy meniscus, surface tension hauling ethane up the steel Rosenberg pressed a stud on his chest panel to take photographs with the digital Hasselblad mounted there. “The boat is riding well. You’ve dipped into the liquid by no more than a few inches, under the combined weight of the boat itself, you, and the equipment…”

“Just as you calculated.”

“Just as I calculated. The density of the ethane—”

“Archimedes’ principle applies, even on Titan. I do understand, Rosenberg.”

“Sorry. Good luck, Paula.”

“Yeah.”

Benacerraf stepped to the rear of the boat and picked up the paddle. This was just another piece of Jitterbug hull, a curved shovel shape, fixed to a bar which had once been a couch strut. Feeling self-conscious, she leaned over to dip the paddle blade in the liquid.

She waved the paddle to and fro, in the ethane. There was little resistance to her motion, and the blade cut smoothly through the fluid without turbulence, but she could feel how the ethane was being cupped by the paddle.

With painful slowness, the boat inched away from the shore.

She was soon panting with the effort of waving the paddle. As she couldn’t sit down she had to lean over the side of the boat to reach the liquid, and that was making her back and arms ache. Her suit was too stiff for rowing, a task for which it had never been designed. And besides, she knew her muscles still hadn’t recovered from their extensive space soak. She made a mental note that they would need a longer handle the next time they tried this stunt.

Despite all this, the boat was gliding forward across the oily surface, fat ripples spreading away from its circular bow, the only sound a glutinous gurgle of ethane against the sides.

“That’s it,” Rosenberg said. “A back and forth motion; that’s fine. Remember the viscosity of the ethane is very low. Once you build up some momentum you should just sail on. Just like the air-bearing facility back in Building 9 at JSC, right? Don’t forget you have a back-up paddle in case you drop that one. Don’t try to reach in after it. And—”

“Let me row the damn boat, Rosenberg.”

He fell silent.

The shoreline receded, the ethane surface between her and solid land, growing into a thick black band.

Behind her, the lake’s far shore began to protrude over the horizon. It was a shallow, dome-shaped hill, blackened by gumbo streaks.

When she had judged she had got to a hundred yards out, she lifted her paddle out of the liquid and dropped it at her feet; her back and shoulders were aching, and she moved her arms around, trying to ease the muscles.

The boat continued to sail on over the surface of the oleaginous fluid. It was as smooth a ride, she thought, as if she was a beetle riding a hockey puck over damp ice.

At last she came to rest. The air seemed a little clearer here, in the middle of the lake, perhaps because of the constant dissolving and exsolving of gases from the ethane. It was as if she was embedded in some clear orange resin, with the dark grey methane clouds scattered over her head in their well-defined layer, like shadows on a ceiling.

From this far out she could make out more of the shape of the lake. It was obviously a horseshoe shape, curving around that central mountain — although from here, if she was honest, it was hard to tell if the lake was a true open horseshoe or if it closed over, around the far side of the mountain, into an annulus.

Looking back to shore was like looking across a sheet of blackened glass, to an encrustation of purple ice and foam at the lake’s rim. She could see Rosenberg standing patiently, stained with gumbo up to his waist, where the cable termination glittered. Seen from here, Rosenberg was very obviously alone on that primeval beach. His figure was the only vertical in a landscape of horizontals, starkly isolated. There was nobody else standing with him: no houses or buildings or cars behind him on that landscape of soft undulations, no trees, no birds in the sky. And in the frigid, mushy depths below her there was no life she could recognize, perhaps no life at all.

The boat rocked with a slow, soothing gentleness, with a period of maybe five or six seconds. The lake surface was almost a perfect black, its ripples heavy and shallow, free of breakers. Most organic solids, raining down from the atmosphere, would simply sink to the bottom of the lake. But here and there Benacerraf could see scatterings of foam, grey and purple. Some of that was spindrift, aerosols caused by bubbles bursting on the surface.

She felt her sense of place and time shift around her. It was as if the landscape of Titan was reaching her, through the isolating layers of her suit; she started to get a sense that she was truly here, alive and sentient, on this ethane lake, a billion miles from her birthplace. It took moments of stillness like this to understand this, she thought. Moments that the Apollo guys, Marcus White and the rest, were never given, in their hectic, task-crammed timelines. Moments that had come only, perhaps, in the quiet of their sleep periods, as those fragile Lunar Modules ticked and creaked around them. Moments, little fragments of true humanity, they were never encouraged to report. What a pity.

She wondered how long she’d been out here.

She felt as if her sense of time was dissolving, stretching like melted candle-wax. Pendulums would swing more slowly here, like the rocking of her boat, in the gentler gravity. Perhaps some pendulum hidden deep in her own being was slowing, too, in response to this small world.

But now Rosenberg waved. He had set up the small TV camera on its stand, looking out at her. And the portable antenna pointed straight up, to where Cassini hovered far above the clouds and haze in its fifty-thousand-mile Clarke orbit.

The comms gear was a reminder that this wasn’t some dumb jaunt on a lake. She was out here to look for amino acids and other good stuff. And this was a NASA extravehicular activity, on the surface of an alien world; they had a duty to return data on what they were doing, whether anybody was listening or not.

Anyhow, she thought, this is the first time in all of human history that a grandmother has gone boating on the surface of a low gravity moon. It ought to be on TV. Jackie should see this. And the boys, she thought wistfully.

She began the series of experiments Rosenberg had set out for her. The first was a series of sample collections; she gathered up droplets from the lake into plexiglass test tubes, and bottom sediment that she trawled up using tubes fixed to a line.

She started up the tilt meter. This little gadget was something like an electronic spirit level. It contained two vials of a conductor fluid; as the boat tipped back and forth under the influence of the lake’s slow waves, the electrical resistance of the fluids in the tubes changed, and could be measured. Next she dipped a refractometer into the liquid to measure its speed of light. The refractometer was a cute thing, a little transparent box with prisms inside it, which she filled up with Clear Lake fluid. She measured the fluid’s ability to conduct heat; by filling up a tube with fluid she immersed a platinum wire, and watched how its resistance changed as she passed current through it. She deployed a simple gadget which measured the speed of a sound wave travelling between two piezoelectric transducers. The sound speed would tell a lot about the ocean, and when she reconfigured the gadget, Benacerraf might be able to make a sonar estimate of the depth of the lake, if the grunge-coated bottom proved reflective enough. She measured the ethane’s dielectric constant — its ability to hold an electric charge — by filling up a plate condenser with fluid, and measuring its capacitance. And so on.

One of Benacerraf’s favorite instruments was a pair of thin metal vanes mounted on a piezoelectric crystal. The crystal drove the vanes, and their resonance depended on the density of the fluid in which they were immersed.

The results of the experiments ought to help determine more about the lake’s nature. The lake wasn’t a simple pool of ethane. There were fractions of other paraffins — methane, propane, butane, others — as well as dissolved nitrogen, and a slew of higher organics. For instance, the refractive index of the lake fluid was very sensitive to the percentage of dissolved methane.

She had to bend over the side of the boat to work, and soon her back was aching once more. She tried to keep her hands clear of the cryogenic fluid of the lake itself. She worked with tongs and pipettes, as if dealing with some acid. She fumbled a little with her gloved hands.

Her last experiment was a plumb line, pleasingly crude and intuitive, just dropped over the side. The line was loaded with a scrap of Command Module aluminum, and the depth was marked out by simple knots in the steel cable. It was a little hard to tell when the string was fully paid out, so soft and muddy was the bottom. When she estimated the weight had reached a reasonably firm surface, she read off the depth. Ten feet.

She described the result, and what she could see, to Rosenberg.

“That’s good, Paula,” he said. “The ethane is deposited at a rate of three feet every ten million years. So that makes your lake maybe thirty million years old, which is pretty young for a crater of such size. When it formed, the crater would have had the kind of shape we recognize on the Moon — a shallow saucer, with maybe a central peak. After that, the ethane lake gathered. But the bedrock ice on Titan flows, on the timescale of a few million years. Viscous relaxation. That pushed up the center of the crater into that ice dome you see. So the ethane was shoved into an annulus, a ring around the domed mountain…”

“And the horseshoe shape?”

“Saturn’s tides. If Titan was covered by an ocean, the surface would be drawn into an egg shape by Saturn’s gravity, with the sharp ends pointing towards and away from Saturn. Our isolated lake is a fragment of that egg-shaped surface. It’s as if the crater is tipped up a little bit; all the fluid is pushed to one end of the annulus channel by the tidal acceleration.”

Benacerraf felt awed. She looked around at the horseshoe shape of the lake once more. Saturn was invisible, but its gigantic influence was everywhere, its gravity field shaping the very nature of the landscape over which she moved. Benacerraf felt tiny, irrelevant, as if cupped in the palm of huge, invisible forces.

On impulse, she bent, stiffly. She got hold of the lip of the boat’s wall, and got down to one knee. Immediately she could feel the cold of the hull, and of the mass of ethane below: it was as if the heat was being drained out of her body through the bone of her knee, the layers of her suit, and she could feel the hot, ineffectual triangles of her laboring suit heater.

She leaned out of the boat, and looked into the ethane. Fat ripples, concentric with the circumference of the boat, oozed across the surface of the lake, suffused with the slow time of Titan. The ethane was utterly black, returning no reflection of her helmet, her face. It was unnerving, as if this wasn’t a liquid at all; it was as if she was poised over a hole in the world, a pit of black space that stretched down to infinity.

She reached out with a gloved hand. She passed her fingers through the ethane. In her peripheral vision she could see that a warning light flashed on her chest panel.

She pulled her hand out of the lake.

She lifted up her glove. The residual ethane gathered into fat little globules on her fingers and palm; its high surface tension had pulled it into these light, mercury-like balls. Set against the blue of her glove, this sample of the lake was a kind of dull brown, but not completely opaque, like dirty petrol. She thought she could see particles, swirling about in the interior of the globules, but the light was poor.

Even as she studied the globules they were shrinking. The boiling point of pure ethane was around ninety below — which was about ninety degrees above the ambient temperature. It was a big temperature jump, but even so, so quickly, the ethane droplets were absorbing the heat which was leaking out of her suit. The rapid evaporation was disturbing, a tough reminder of the fragility of her situation here. And every molecule of ethane that left her hand would carry away a little more of the heat her body needed.

She shook her hand free of the remaining droplets; they scattered from her glove in slow-motion parabolic arcs.

When she looked at her hand again, she found that the evaporating ethane had left a purplish scum on the fabric, in little discrete spots. Complex, prebiotic hydrocarbons: once more, she was immersed in the stuff of life.

“Paula,” Rosenberg called now, urgency in his voice.

“What?”

“Take a look up there. The clouds.” Benacerraf had to tilt back on her heels to see. The methane clouds were still more broken now, and were streaming, across the orange haze ceiling beyond.

“Wind coming up,” she murmured. “That was sudden. What do you think, Rosenberg? Fifteen knots?”

“More like twenty, I’d say. And that means waves. Paula, get out of there.”

It was probably good advice. Waves on Titan were not like Earth’s.

She looked around, towards the center of the lake.

The waves were already coming, radiating out from the domed ice mountain at the heart of the horseshoe, fired by Titan’s low gravity, they were like slow-motion tsunamis: walls of black ethane, each of them at least a hundred and fifty feet tall. It was hard to tell, but Benacerraf estimated the waves were a half-mile apart. They were moving across the surface of the lake at maybe thirty miles an hour — a glacial pace by Earth standards, where waves of such size would have moved seven times as fast.

Maybe the boat could ride this out, just float over the back of those huge, stretching beasts.

Maybe not.

She began to drag her paddle through the paraffin lake once more, and she could see Rosenberg hauling clumsily on his cable, his feet scrabbling at the gumbo for footing.

Within a couple of minutes, with a heavy bump, the boat had grounded against the shore of Clear Lake.

Benacerraf looked back. The waves were heaping up still, glistening black walls sweeping grandly towards the shore. But they would break when they reached the shallows.

With Rosenberg’s help, she began to haul the boat up the beach, far enough that the breaking waves couldn’t reach.

“Get moving, you old bastard.” Bart went around the room, his white jacket stained by some yellow fluid, and he de-opaqued the windows with brisk slaps.

It took Marcus White a while to figure out where he was. It often did nowadays. So he just lay there. He’d been in the same position all night, and he could feel how his body had worn a groove in the mattress. He wondered if Bart had ever seen Psycho. “I thought—” His mouth was dry, and he ran his tongue over his wrinkled gums. “You know, for a minute I thought I was back there. Like before.”

Bart was just clattering around at the bedside cabinet, pulling out clothes, and looking for his stuff: a hand towel, soap, medication, swabs. Bart never met your eyes, and he never watched for the creases on your pants.

“My father was there.” Actually he didn’t know what in hell his father was doing up there. “The sunlight was real strong. And the ground was a kind of gentle brown, depending on which way you looked. It looked like a beach, come to think of it.” He smiled. “Yeah, a beach.” That was it. His dream had muddled up the memories, and he’d been simultaneously thirty-nine years old, and a little kid on a beach, running towards his father.

“Ah, Jesus.” Bart was poking at the sheet between White’s legs. His hand came up dripping. Bart pulled apart the top of White’s pajama pants. White crossed his arms over his crotch, but he didn’t have the strength to resist. “You old bastard,” Bart shouted. “You’ve done it again. You’ve pulled out your fucking catheter again. You filthy old bastard.” Bart got a towel and began to swab away the piss.

White saw there was blood in the thick golden fluid. Goddamn surgeons. Always sticking a tube into one orifice or another. “I saw my buddy — Tom, you know — jumping around, and I thought he looked like a human-shaped beach ball, all white, bouncing across the sand…”

Bart slapped at his shoulder, hard enough to sting. “When are you going to get it into your head that nobody gives a flying fuck about that stuff? Huh?” He swabbed at the mess in the bed, his shoulders knotted up. “Jesus. I ought to take you down to the happy booth right now. Old bastard.”

Like a beach. Funny how I never thought of that before. It had taken him forty years, but he was finally making sense of those three days. More sense than he could make of where he was now, anyhow. Not that he gave a damn.

Bart cleaned him up, dressed him, and fed him with some tasteless pap. Then he dumped him in a chair in the day room. Bart stomped off, still muttering about the business with the catheter.

Asshole, White thought.

The day room was a long, thin hall, like a corridor. Nothing but a row of old people. Every one of them had his own tiny softscreen, squawking away at him. Or her. It was hard to tell. Every so often a little robot nurse would come by, a real R2-D2 type of thing, and it would give you a coffee. If you hadn’t moved for a while, it would check your pulse with a little metal claw.

The softscreens were still basically TVs but you had to set them with voice commands, and he never could get the hang of that; he’d asked for a remote, but they didn’t make them any more. So he just had his set tuned to the news channels, all day.

Sometimes there was news about the program, if you knew where to look. Which he generally didn’t.

He’d heard they were doing more EVAs on Titan, which was a hell of a thing, but he hadn’t seen a single damn picture about that. Of course it was different back then. When the Eagle set down, he’d watched the walk itself at Joan Aldrin’s house at Nassau Bay. When Buzz first came on screen she kicked her feet and blew kisses at the screen. Those creaky old pictures, like some kind of silent movie. And then he’d gone on to one hell of a Moonwalk party with some of the guys…

But there wasn’t even anybody up in LEO nowadays, except a couple of Red Chinese, maybe.

He couldn’t find anything about Titan. He folded up the screen in disgust.

He tried to read. You could still get paper books, as opposed to softscreen, although it cost you. But by the time he’d gotten to the bottom of the page he would forget what was at the top; and he’d doze off, and drop the damn thing. Then the fucking R2-D2 would roll over to see if he was dead.

The door behind him was open, letting in dense, smoggy air. Nobody was watching him. Nobody but old people, anyhow.

He got out of his chair. Not so hard, if you watched your balance. He leaned on his frame and set off towards the door.

The day room depressed him. It was like an airport departure lounge. And there was only one way out of it.

Unless you counted the happy booth. A demographic adjustment, Maclachlan called it.

Maclachlan was an asshole. But White couldn’t really blame them, Bart and the rest. Just too many old bastards like me, too few of them to look out for us, no decent jobs for them to do.

Outside the light was flat and hard. He squinted up, the sweat already starting to run into his eyes. Not a shred of ozone up there. The home stood in the middle of a vacant lot. There was a freeway in the middle distance, a river of metal he could just about make out. Maybe he could hitch a ride into town, find a bar, sink a few cold ones. But he had the catheter. Well, he’d pull it out in the john; he’d done that before.

He worked his way across the uneven ground. He had to lean so far forward he was almost falling, just to keep going ahead. Like before. You’d had to keep tipped forward, leaning on your toes, to balance the mass of the PLSS. And, just like now, you were never allowed to take the damn thing off for a breather.

The lot seemed immense. There were rocks and boulders scattered about. Maybe it had once been a garden, but nothing grew here now. Actually the whole of the Midwest was dried out like this.

At least this was still the United States of America, though. At least he was still an American. Things could be worse. At least he hadn’t become a fucking New Columbian.

He reached the freeway. There was no fence, no sidewalk, nowhere to cross. He raised an arm, but he couldn’t keep it up for long. The cars roared by, small sleek things, at a huge speed: a hundred fifty, two hundred maybe. And they were close together, just inches apart. Goddamn smart cars that could drive themselves. He couldn’t even see if there were people in them.

He wondered if anyone still drove Corvettes.

Now there was somebody walking towards him, along the side of the road. He couldn’t see who it was.

The muscles in his hands were starting to tremble, with the effort of gripping the frame. Your hands always got tired first, in microgravity…

There were two of them. They wore broad-rimmed white hats against the sun. “You old bastard.” It was Bart, and that other one who was worse than Bart. They grabbed his arms and just held him up like a doll. Bart got hold of the walker, and, incredibly strong, lifted it up with one hand. “I’ve had it with you!” Bart shouted.

There was a pressure at his neck, something cold and hard.

The light strengthened, and washed out the detail, the rocky ground, the blurred sun.

He was in a big room, white walled, surgically sterile. He was sitting up in a chair. Christ, some guy was shaving his chest.

Then he figured it. Oh, hell, it was all right. It was just a suit tech. He was in the MSOB. He was being instrumented. The suit tech plastered his chest with four silver chloride electrodes. “This won’t hurt a bit, you old bastard.” He had the condom over his dick already. And he had on his fecal containment bag, the big diaper. The suit tech was saying something. “Just so you don’t piss yourself on me one last time.”

He lifted up his arm. He didn’t recognize it. It was thin and coated with blue tubes, like veins.

It must be the pressure garment, a network of hoses and rings and valves and pulleys that coated your body. Yeah, the pressure garment; he could feel its resistance when he tried to move.

There was a sharp stab of pain at his chest. Some other electrode, probably. It didn’t bother him.

He couldn’t see so well now; there was a kind of glassiness around him. That was the polycarbonate of his big fishbowl helmet. They must have locked him in already.

The suit tech bent down in front of him and peered into his helmet. “Hey.”

“It’s okay. I know I got to wait.”

“What? Listen. It was just on the softscreen. The other one’s just died. What was his name? How about that. You made the news, one more time.”

“It’s the oxygen.”

“Huh?”

“One hundred percent. I got to sit for a half hour while the console gets the nitrogen out of my blood.”

The suit tech shook his head. “You’ve finally lost it, haven’t you, you old bastard? You’re the last one. You weren’t the first up there, but you sure as hell are the last. How about that.” But there was an odd flicker in the suit tech’s face. Like doubt. Or, wistfulness.

He didn’t think anything about it. Hell, it was a big day for everybody, here in the Manned Spacecraft Operations Building.

“A towel.”

“What?”

“Will you put a towel over my helmet? I figure I might as well take a nap.”

The suit tech laughed. “Oh, sure. A towel.”

He went off, and came back with a white cloth, which he draped over his head. He was immersed in a washed-out white light. “Here you go.” He could hear the suit tech walk away, laughing.

In a few minutes, it would start. With the others, carrying his oxygen unit, he’d walk along the hallways out of the MSOB, and there would be Geena, holding little Bobby up to him. He’d be able to hold their hands, touch their faces, but he wouldn’t feel anything so well through the thick gloves. And then the transfer van would take him out to Merritt Island, where the Saturn would be waiting for him, gleaming white and wreathed in cryogenic vapor: waiting to take him back up to the lunar beach, and his father.

All that soon. For now, he was locked in the suit, with nothing but the hiss of his air. It was kind of comforting.

He closed his eyes.

Paula Benacerraf and Bill Angel, two human beings from Earth, were climbing the highest mountain on a moon of Saturn. They were seeking water ice, to supplement their life support systems.

Toiling up the slope in their bulky white suits, and with their sleds sliding across the gumbo, they must look, Benacerraf thought, like two grubs hauling chunks of cast-off exoskeleton over the skin of some huge animal.

Benacerraf’s suit felt hot, and chafed at her groin and armpits, and she could feel blisters forming across the soles of her feet. Every step she took in the snowshoes, going up the gumbo slope, she had to angle her feet and dig in to get traction sufficient to haul the mass of the sled another few feet. Her visor was misted up from her breath, and she could feel her heart hammering.

She paused for breath. She leaned into the sled harness — it was adapted from an Apollo couch restraint — and she rested her gloved hands against her legs. Her helmet lamp splashed light over the glistening slope before her.

As he slogged ahead of her up the gumbo slope, dragging his sled, Bill Angel sang some kind of marching song to himself. Just a couple of phrases of it, over and over. It was easy for him to find his way, sight or no sight; he was just following the line of maximum slope. He was already maybe twenty yards ahead of her, and his form was dimming a little in the murky air, although his stained white suit still showed up brightly against the black layer of methane clouds that hid the mountain’s summit, and the splash of light of his helmet lamp — she made him wear it as a beacon — was clearly visible.

He was as encumbered by his sled as she was by hers. The sleds were just cone-section panels of Apollo Command Module hull, so big they would be impossible to pull under Earth gravity, even empty as they were right now. But this wasn’t Earth. And Angel just marched on, dwarfed by his sled, his legs shoving at the gumbo like pistons.

Rosenberg called from Tartarus, via S-band, his signal bouncing off Cassini.

Clumsily, Benacerraf flicked a switch on her chest panel. Rosenberg had rigged up two separate S-band frequencies: one open to the three of them, and the other available to Rosenberg and Benacerraf alone.

On the private band, Rosenberg said: “How’s it going up there?”

She lifted up her arm; there was a reflective panel there that let her read her chest panel. She had rigged up her panel so she could cycle it between the status of her own suit and Angel’s. “He seems to be doing okay. Heartbeat a little high, maybe…” She switched back into Angel’s voice loop for a second. “Still, he goes on with the damn singing. Over and over.”

“Singing I can forgive. Check your marker.”

She looked back down the slope. It was vertiginous — under Titan’s weak gravity, this ice mountain had a gradient of maybe one in four for most of this ascent — and they were already a couple of thousand feet above the reference level where Discovery sat. The mountain was a flat cone, thrusting out of the landscape. It was maybe nine miles across, two high. An ice mountain as steep as this would have been impossible on Earth because of the higher gravity; the pressure at its base would have melted the ice, and the form would subside, leaving hillocks only a fraction as high. From here, the base of the mountain was hard to see, washed out by the eternal murky haze. She could barely see the last marker she’d planted; it was just a ghostly vertical line of white metal against the dark-stained tholin slush.

From the pile in her sled she dug out another marker — an aluminum strut from Apollo — and rammed it into the gumbo.

When she turned, Angel was almost invisible, still ploughing upwards.

“Bill, don’t get too far ahead.”

His singing cut off as if she had turned a switch. He stopped moving; he straightened up and turned, as if looking down towards her.

She took a slug of stale recycled water from the nipple in her helmet, and leaned into the harness once more.

When they were side by side, maybe thirty yards apart, Angel started to toil upwards alongside her. Singing.

“Where did you learn the song, Bill? The Air Force?”

Again, that switch-like cut-off. “Nope,” he said.

“Then where?”

“My father. Dad would take me walking in the hills. I’d scramble along behind him, over scree and bare rock…” Angel laughed. “That old bastard would walk me until my feet bled into my sneakers.”

Benacerraf frowned. “It sounds kind of hard.”

He tilted towards her, and, through his visor, she could dimly make out his sunken eye sockets. “You’re not some Freudian, are you, Paula? Did my dad’s cruelty make me what I am? Was his ghost there to push me aboard Endeavour that last time? Is it his fault I went crazy half-way to Saturn?”

Benacerraf felt out of her depth. Was he really being so self-reflective…? or was even this remark just another thread in the tapestry of his irrationality?

She said, “What do I know? All I said was it seems tough, to drag some little kid over the kind of terrain you’re talking about.”

“Maybe. But I learned a hell of a lot.”

“Like what?”

“Like how to endure. You see, you got to have some kind of mantra, to get you through experiences like this, Paula. Crap that just goes on and on. You can sing, you can fantasize about sex, you can talk to yourself. Anything, to take your mind off what you got ahead of you, the pain in your feet and legs.”

“It sounds like auto-hypnosis.”

“Maybe it is. Mind-travelling, my dad called it. Seventy percent of any climb is mental. If you’re going to get through a slog like this, you got to fight the demons inside. Maybe you should take a leaf.”

“Maybe,” she said.

Within a couple of minutes, Angel had resumed his singing.

She considered switching off his loop. But if she did that, she couldn’t tell if he was in difficulty. She compromised. She turned down the gain, so Angel’s voice was reduced to a kind of bass insect-whisper.

Soon her shoulders, back, feet and crotch were aching again, and her body was telling her it wanted to stop, now.

Maybe I ought to try it, she thought, Papa Angel’s patent balm for the soul.

Always a little further, pilgrim, I will go. Always a little further…

Oddly, it seemed to work. Her thoughts started to diffuse, and she entered a kind of orange, mindless tunnel, of pain and effort and tholin slush that stretched on, up the hillside above her.

Always a little further.

After a time, the going underfoot seemed to be getting a little easier. She didn’t sink quite so far into the gumbo, and it wasn’t so sticky when she tried to lift up her snowshoed feet.

Then, at last, she felt a scrape of some more resilient surface under her aluminum snowshoes.

She stopped, and leaned into her harness. She tipped up her foot and dug at the gumbo with the lip of her snowshoe. There was some pale grey substance, like fine gravel, mixed in with the purple-brown gumbo.

“Hey, Bill,” she said.

“What?”

“I think I found ice.”

He laughed. “I been crunching over some shit for a hundred yards or more.”

She looked up, tipping to balance the mass of her pack.

The slope pitched up before her as steeply as ever. But now she could see that the purple-brown gumbo layer had been washed away, exposing grey-white streaks beneath. And when she leaned back to look further up the slope, she saw the surface turned into an almost pure white, streaked here and there with tholin rivulets. The white continued all the way up through the orange air, until it disappeared into the lid of grey-black methane cloud which hid the summit of Mount Othrys.

“How about that. Rosenberg, I think we did it.”

“You found bedrock?”

“Water ice.”

“How high are you?”

Benacerraf was carrying an altimeter, cannibalized from one of the Apollos; she wore it on a chain that dangled from her backpack. She reached around clumsily, and pulled the altimeter up before her face.

“A shade over three thousand feet,” she said.

“Good,” Rosenberg said.

“Good?”

“Sure. You’re well above the limit altitude of the rain. It only rains on the summits, never on the plains. It’s just what I would have expected…”

“Theory later, Rosenberg,” Benacerraf said.

“It’s just nice when you figure something, and it works out. Makes the Universe seem a little less scary.”

She let herself out of her harness, and made sure her sled wasn’t going to slide back on down the gumbo. Then she walked forward, until the gumbo beneath her feet had thinned out, and she was stepping on bare ice. She kicked off her snowshoes, and left them at the edge of the gumbo.

The ice surface wasn’t hard; it crunched beneath her booted feet, the noise sharp in the thick air.

She looked around. “The edge of the gumbo is quite sharp,” she reported to Rosenberg. “I guess we could feel it thinning out for a few hundred yards. But it’s clearly keyed to the altitude and its edge is a definite line. Like a tree line.”

“A gumbo line,” Angel said.

“The surface isn’t solid, here. It’s some kind of regolith. The ground here is very fine-grained. Almost powdery, not like ice at all. I can kick it up loosely with my toe, and it is sticking in fine layers to my boots.”

“Is it supporting your weight?”

“Yes, But I sink into the surface a little, maybe a half-inch, before it compacts It’s a little like walking on even snow.”

“Snow it ain’t,” Rosenberg said. “We’re two hundred degrees below the freezing point of water here… What you’re walking on is impact-gardened regolith. Ancient ice, smashed to pieces by meteorite and micrometeorite impacts, over billions of years. Like Moon dust, pulverized to a depth of inches or feet.”

“But this isn’t the Moon,” Benacerraf said. “Wouldn’t that thick atmosphere shield out the bolides?”

“Yes. But some, the big ones, will still get through. And remember that Titan isn’t particularly geologically active; that ice has probably lain there exposed almost since Titan first accreted, four billion years ago.”

“That’s time for a lot of gardening,” Angel said. “Hey, double-dome. We could go skiing up here.”

“I wouldn’t recommend it,” Rosenberg replied drily.

She lifted up her boot. “It has a lot of cohesion. I’m leaving firm footprints here; the regolith seems to take a sharp slope, of seventy or eighty degrees. Cohesion and adhesion.”

“Probably from organic deposits on the grain surfaces,” Rosenberg said.

“It’s going to be easy to walk here,” she said. “Much easier than on the gumbo. I guess we can leave the snowshoes behind.”

Angel was walking over to Benacerraf. Free of his harness, he seemed to bounce between each step; he floated over the ice like a human-shaped beach ball, she thought, his white suit still streaked with gumbo. He looked like a floating ghost, in the murky light.

Benacerraf stared at her own footprints, crisp and sharp and white, in the virgin Titan ice.

Benacerraf and Angel harnessed themselves up once more, and renewed their haul up the ice slope. The footing was much easier, and the aluminum carapaces of the sleds scraped easily over the crisp, firm ice.

Soon their footprints stretched down the flank of the mountain behind them, partly obscured by the snail-like trails of the sleds.

The whiteness of the ice underfoot was a sharp contrast to the grey-black lid of methane clouds. Through gaps in the clouds overhead she could see the upper haze layers, a uniform orange which seemed lurid to eyes which were becoming accustomed to the Earth-like grey-white of the ice. Again, she had the disorienting feeling that she was travelling through some false-color VR landscape; Angel’s suit looked underlit by the white below, the contours of his body shaded by the burnt orange above.

Another couple of thousand feet higher, Benacerraf called a halt. She felt hot and cooped up in her suit. She felt as if she could just open up her faceplate, take a deep breath of this cool mountain air, and rub a little snow in her face.

Angel slowed and stopped. Over the VHP link between them she could hear the rattle of his vacuum-damaged throat, the slurping of water from the nipple in his helmet. Discreetly, Benacerraf checked his suit diagnostics on her chest panel. He was using a lot of consumables, but no more than she was.

“What do you think?” he said at length. “Is the regolith deep enough here?”

“It’s hard to tell. It all feels the same underfoot.”

“The depth is probably pretty uniform, away from the gumbo layer,” Rosenberg said from Tartarus. “It’s just, the higher you go, the cleaner it should get.”

“This will do as well as anywhere,” Benacerraf said. “Come on, Bill. Let’s get these damn sleds filled up.”

She bounded down the few paces to the side of her sled and lifted out her shovel.

As it happened, the shovel was the same piece of equipment she’d used to bury Nicola Mott.

Using both hands, holding the handle away from her body, she pushed the rounded edge of the shovel blade into the regolith. There was a hiss of metal against ice grains.

The blade sank in easily for a few inches, but resistance built up quickly. When the blade was maybe five inches deep, she couldn’t push it any further in. She hopped forward and leaned over the crude handle of the shovel, propping it under her belly with her hands still wrapped around it, trying to use her weight to push the shovel deeper.

She achieved maybe another inch of penetration. In this gravity, her weight didn’t count for a lot.

She straightened up, panting, and lifted up the shovel. Some of the ice she’d raised so laboriously just floated off the blade.

She swivelled to the sled, and dumped in the ice regolith. It fell slowly, and rattled as it hit the aluminum hull of the sled.

She straightened up again. “It’s not going to be easy,” she said to Rosenberg, “When you push in the blade, the regolith compacts after a couple of inches. It feels more like sand than snow—”

“It isn’t snow,” Rosenberg said.

“Whatever. It’s going to take a long time to fill the sleds like this.”

“Paula.” Bill Angel said. Try this.”

She turned to look.

He was bending, closer to the ground, so that his blade was entering the regolith almost parallel to the surface. “See?” he said. It slides easy into these looser top layers. Then you can scoop up a big shovelful. I can feel it.” He was right, she saw; he was managing to lift big, tottering heaps of the regolith, which he dumped into his sled.

“I guess he’s right,” Rosenberg said. “You’re gathering raw materials for life support, Paula, not digging for a core sample. Get it whichever way is easiest.”

She bent, and started scraping up the regolith the way Angel did it. The first couple of times she managed to come away with piles of loosely-packed regolith on her blade as big and precarious as Angel’s. But the constant bending and straightening, against the stiffness of her suit, began to tell on her lower back and thighs.

She turned so that she was working uphill. That brought the regolith closer, and made it a little easier on her back, but it was still difficult, heavy work. Her EMU wasn’t made for heavy labor; it was hot, confining, uncomfortable, and she wished again she could take it off.

She thought about Angel. Now he was humming, the same marching tune as before.

Perhaps it was the climb. She felt vaguely exhilarated herself — liberated by the steady exercise, the sense of altitude, the crispness of the icy regolith.

She realized now that she’d never truly gotten over her sense of confinement after being cooped up in Discovery for all those years; Titan, with its lousy visibility, socked-in clouds and gloopy, impeding surface, wasn’t much of a release.

Maybe the same factors are working on Angel, she thought. Maybe this is working to clear out the contents of his head.

All he needed, she supposed, was a little space.

The light changed, subtly. It became somehow pearly.

She lifted up her head.

Raindrops were falling towards her face.

It wasn’t like rain on Earth.

It was methane rain.

The biggest drops were blobs of liquid a half-inch across. They came down surrounded by a mist, of much smaller drops. The drops fell slowly, perhaps five or six feet in a second. It was more like being caught in a snowstorm, with the flakes replaced by these big globules of methane liquid. The drops weren’t spheres; they were visibly deformed into flat hockey-puck shapes, flattened out, she supposed, by air resistance. They caught the murky light, shimmering.

The first drops hit her visor.

Each drop impacted with a fat, liquid noise; their splash was slow and languid. The drops spread out rapidly, or else collapsed into many smaller, more compact droplets over the plexiglass. Low surface tension, she thought automatically. Some of the liquid trickled down the contours of her visor, but the evaporation of the drops, over such a large area, was rapid, and each drop dried quickly.

Her face felt a little cooler, she guessed because of the evaporation of the liquid, carrying away some of her heat.

She leaned forward, compensating for the mass of her pack, and looked down. As it hit the ground, each raindrop broke up into many smaller drops, which trickled rapidly into the regolith, rinsing the tholin streaks off the ice.

Bill Angel turned his head this way and that, letting the rain fall over his faceplate and helmet. “It sounds beautiful,” he said. “Like being a kid again. Lying under a wooden roof at night, hearing the rain come down…”

“Yes,” she said. “Yes.” And in that moment she felt doser to Angel than at any time since they left Earth.

“You know,” Rosenberg said, “of all the worlds in the Solar System, only Earth and Titan know rain. I wish I was there.”

“Next time, Rosenberg.”

She stood in the rain, wishing it would go on forever. Not for the first time she was lulled into a kind of peace by the slowness of Titan, the paradoxical heaviness of time in this thin gravity, the slow rhythms of nature here; it was as if she was shedding the frantic, energy-laden pace of Earth, and becoming a creature of Saturn twilight.

At last, the slow patter of drops against her helmet stopped. She felt a sharp stab of regret.

There was still a faint wash of small droplets around her, but these were dissipating quickly. And now there was a mist in the air, a light, yellowish fog; it made the air seem brighter, like the air after a storm on Earth. Angel, standing before her, looked as if he had some kind of halo around him.

She reported all this to Rosenberg.

“That’s a rain ghost, Paula. I want you to take a sample…”

She dug a sample bottle out of a pocket on her EMU, and opened it to the air. “Why?”

“The rain starts by nucleating around particles in the upper atmosphere. That stuff is usually suspended higher up, and won’t reach the surface. But it can be transported down by the weight of the rain, down to lower altitudes. When the rain stops, the last drops evaporate, leaving their cores exposed. The rain ghost. You see? Paula, what we have is a free sample of upper-altitude haze particles.”

“Terrific.” She stoppered the bottle, labelled it with her propelling pencil (not a pen — ink froze), and put the bottle back in her pocket.

She looked around. The rain had gone: evaporated from her visor, and was absorbed into the ground. Above them, the methane clouds, evidently rained out, had cleared to a scattered, broken layer of dark fragments, revealing an orange glow above.

Save for the lingering rain ghost, it was as if the storm had never been.

“I guess we can go back,” Benacerraf said. “The sleds are full.”

“Yes,” Rosenberg said. “Your walk-back limit—”

“Oh, fuck our walk-back limit,” Angel said abruptly. “Rosenberg, how far are we from the top of this mountain?”

Rosenberg said reluctantly, “Give me an altitude.”

Benacerraf consulted her altimeter. “Around eight thousand feet.”

“That leaves you three thousand shy of the summit. I don’t recommend going further,” Rosenberg said strongly. “You’re climbing above the planetary boundary layer, and the winds are going to pick up. And in another thousand feet or so you’ll be in the methane cloud layer.”

“Actually, that shouldn’t be a problem,” Benacerraf said slowly. “The cloud is pretty broken up after the rain, Rosenberg.”

“I can’t believe I’m hearing this,” Rosenberg snapped. “Maybe the altitude’s affecting your oxygen supply.”

“Come on, double-dome,” Angel said. “Don’t be an asshole.”

“Bill—” Rosenberg hesitated. “What’s the point? You won’t be able to see anyhow. I’m sorry to be brutal, but—”

“The point, dipshit, is that I’ll make it to the top. The point is, I haven’t crossed two billion miles just to stop a few thousand fucking feet shy of the highest point on the moon. Or isn’t that logical enough for you?”

“Paula, if you go along with this, you’re as crazy as he is.”

Anger flared in her. “Drop it, Rosenberg.”

They were, she decided there and then, going to climb the mountain.

For today, anyhow, Bill Angel was out of his craziness. And if anything was going to keep him together, this kind of experience was.

Anyhow he was right. Wasn’t this exactly the kind of exploration they had come so far to make?

She floated over to Angel. She took his hand. “Rosenberg, I’ll leave markers, and give you an altitude every few hundred feet.”

“How can I stop you doing this?”

“You can’t,” Angel said. “So shut the fuck up, and enjoy the ride.”

Hand in hand, Benacerraf and Angel began to climb the icy regolith.

With the methane clouds broken up, it was bright enough to walk without helmet lamps.

Free of the gumbo, free of the sled, the landscape opening up around her, she felt as if she was floating above the surface. She felt the way Marcus White and some, of the others had described walking on the Moon. Only the stiffness of her surface suit, the disconcerting mass of her backpack, encumbered her now.

It was like being eight years old again, she thought: her adult cares sloughed away, her body light and compact and the air fresh and new and full of light.

Soon they were in the lower layers of the cloud. It was like being in a thick, dark mist, like smoke from a forest fire. Benacerraf could still see, roughly, where she was, but she was glad to have the slope of the ground for orientation.

After a couple of hundred feet they emerged above the cloud layer, into clear orange air. The regolith here was still pretty much grey-white, cleansed by methane rain. The lighting was orange and grey, surreal, dim like an early dawn, but bright enough they didn’t need their helmet lamps to see.

She strode on, into the light.

They came upon the summit suddenly.

The regolith slope foreshortened before Benacerraf, and she realized they were approaching some kind of ridge. She slowed, and pulled at Angel’s hand to warn him.

Still hand in hand, they approached the ridge. The slope flattened out, to a broad ledge maybe twenty feet wide. Leaving Angel behind, Benacerraf walked cautiously forward.

She was standing on the rim of a crater, puncturing the summit of Othrys.

“Take it easy, Paula,” Rosenberg said. “We don’t know how friable that surface is. Don’t go close to the edge.”

The crater was like a huge amphitheatre, bathed in the ubiquitous orange glow. “It must be four miles across, maybe five… I can see the far rim quite clearly. And in the base there is a dome structure. No central peak—”

“It’s a caldera,” Rosenberg said. “A cryovolcano. Fuelled by ammonia-water lava, a remnant of the primeval ocean.”

She looked down towards the ground.

The light was bright — better than twilight up here, like an autumn sunset, perhaps. The sky was empty of cloud, save for a scattering of light cirrus clouds around the zenith, probably methane and nitrogen ice.

The methane clouds formed a distinct layer, a thousand feet below her. They were black, fat cumuli with lumpy tops and flat bases, like froth riding on an invisible membrane in the air. The clouds stretched to the horizon, but through them she could make out the ground. It was an orange sheet, punctured by the jet black of ethane crater lakes, like a photographic negative of the Everglades. She thought she could make out Clear Lake, its compact cashew-nut shape far below, all but hidden by cloud and mist.

The horizon was visible, even through the orange haze. It was the dark band where the parallel sheets of sky-haze, methane cloud layer and punctured land met, all around her. It seemed close by: seventy or eighty miles away, she judged. And it was curved, quite sharply, as if seen through a distorting lens.

Titan was visibly round; she had a powerful sense that she was standing on a sphere, that she was clinging to the surface of a small, three-dimensional object, suspended in space, swathed by a duck layer of air.

“Paula.” Angel was waiting for her, a few yards short of the summit. “Are we here?”

“Yes, Bill. We made it. We climbed Othrys.”

He was standing slumped forward to balance his pack, and with his arms held loose at his sides. It was like an ape’s gait, she thought.

And so they were: two clever apes, who had made it to the highest point on Titan.

She walked down, took Angel’s hand, and began to lead him to the summit. “It’s beautiful, Bill, so beautiful.”

His blind face turned, the orange curve of Titan reflected in his visor. The crunch of the regolith beneath his boots was loud and sharp in the still, huge air.

When they got back to Tartarus, Rosenberg insisted on passing the Titan water through the life support system’s filters to get rid of the remnant tholins. At last, though, he was able to bring Benacerraf a bowl — in fact an EMU visor — brimming full of cool, clear Titan water.

She raised it to her lips.

It was the finest drink she’d taken in seven years, sweeter than wine.

Jiang Ling first saw the asteroid with her naked eyes when Tianming was ninety days out from Earth, ten days from its closest encounter.

At first the asteroid was barely more than a point of light — indistinguishable from the remote stars, had she not known where, precisely, to look. But by the day after that 2002OA had grown to a distinct oval shape: almost like a potato, she thought irreverently, battered and irregular. She knew that from now on the asteroid would grow visibly, day by day, and then hour by hour, until at last its battered grey hide filled the small viewing window of her living compartment.

After the closest approach, the asteroid would then recede, just as rapidly.

But that, for her, was only a theoretical possibility.

Every day she performed two softscreen shows: one in Han Chinese for the benefit of her countrymen, one in English for the foreigners. She was allowed to say what she wished, although the Party expressed clear, if rather obvious, preferences.

Jiang adjusted the angle of her big S-band antenna, ensuring it was centered on the fat disc of Earth. Then she positioned herself before the Tianming’s single camera, fixed to a bracket on the wall. She had no props or charts or effects; none were necessary. It was sufficient that she simply talk into the camera, smoothly and plausibly, and production crews on the ground would later patch in such illustrations and other footage as was required.

She anchored herself over her table, and prepared what she would say.

…In the ninety days since it had been pushed out of orbit by its solid-propellant injection engine, Tianming had coasted slowly away from Earth, heading outwards from the sun. It had dogged the heels of the home planet, she thought, as a dog will track its owner. Thus she had drifted more than three and a half million miles from Earth, and when the Tianming’s slow thermal roll brought the small viewing window into the right direction, she could see Earth and Moon together: twin crescents before the huge glare of the sun, the smaller brown alongside the fatter blue-white, so close to each other she could cover up both Earth and its satellite with the palm of her right hand, upheld before her.

And there was her theme.

She said: “It is precisely three thousand, nine hundred and sixty-seven years since Chinese astronomers witnessed an extraordinary heavenly event.

“The motions of all five naked-eye-visible planets brought them together in the sky. Above the crescent Moon at the horizon, Venus, Mercury, Mars, Saturn and Jupiter were strung out like lights on some celestial road, near the great square of Pegasus. That unique conjunction must have been a transfixing event. It was the beginning of the planetary cycles of our ancient astronomers.

“There has been no other time in the last four thousand years, and there will not be in the next four thousand, when such a spectacle will be visible again. But I am reminded of it now, as I study the Earth, Moon and sun framed together in the window of my capsule. How appropriate it is that a Chinese person should be here, to witness this unique conjunction!”

The joy in her voice was unfeigned. Jiang Ling was happy and proud to be here. She said that in her broadcasts, and she meant it.

The habitable compartments of Tianming were small, confining. The craft was improvised, of course, and much of its mass besides was given over to the weapon and its support systems, rather than to her comforts. But she was comfortable here, in this little spinning metal shell in space, and she was not given to claustrophobia.

Her mother told her she was happy in space, and nowhere else. It was true.

Sometimes it struck her as remarkable, however, how everything in the Universe had become separated into two distinct categories, characterized around herself: within a few feet of her body, contained in this compact craft, or else they were millions of miles away.

She continued with her broadcast, and other duties.

Her shelter in space consisted of cylindrical compartments, strung together along a common axis, like a collapsible telescope. Its curved hull was swathed with a powder-white insulating blanket, which shone brightly in the sun. Three huge solar panels were fixed around the module’s widest section; they could be swivelled, like the faces of flowers, to trap the sunlight, and they were covered with cells, big black squares neatly aligned.

The smaller cylinders were used for docking with ferry craft and experimental work, and they were crammed with storage lockers, science equipment and control panels. The main body of the craft was called the working compartment, some fourteen feet wide.

There was a small table at which she could sit, by wrapping her legs around a rudimentary T-shaped chair. There were control and instrument panels, and command and signal equipment of the type used in Lei Feng spaceships. There were a number of work positions, where she could take measurements of such items of scientific interest as the interplanetary plasma environment surrounding the ship. There was a single, rather small porthole. During the cruise, the Tianming was rolled, continually, to ensure a uniform heating by the sun’s rays; this had the effect of limiting her useful observations.

To the left and right of the workstations there were controls for the craft’s basic systems: air regulation filters and pumps, temperature and humidity controllers, as well as more equipment and bio-medical research apparatus.

There was a small galley area, with enough supplies, she was told, for a mission of one hundred days, with a small margin. There was an exercise cycle into which she could strap herself. Her orders were to use this for no less than three hours a day, in order to reduce the risk of muscle wastage and bone erosion.

Beyond the working chamber, inaccessible to Jiang, was a small hemispherical module containing rocket motors and propellant tanks.

Her home in space was brightly lit, compact and cheerful. She felt liberated, after the confines of the Lei Feng capsule, within which it had been barely possible to move. Everything was new and clean, even the lavatory section, the drawers full of neatly folded coveralls and underwear. The fans and pumps hummed comfortingly, and there was a smell of freshness — not a natural smell, but like a new carpet, she thought.

She slept in a cupboard, a box little larger than she was. Inside, however, tucked into her sleeping bag with the folding door drawn to, she was secure.

She had brought with her the small brass bell that had accompanied her on her first flight, in Lei Feng Number One — how long ago that seemed! As she prepared for sleep, she watched it drift in stray currents in the circulating air, on its curling length of vermilion ribbon, occasionally ringing. The inscribed face of Mao was intermittently visible, like the Moon hidden by clouds.

During her hundred-day flight, she performed science experiments with her space aquarium.

It looked like a suitcase containing two carousels from a compact disc player; but the walls of the carousels were clear, and murky water was visible within. The aquarium contained one thousand mussel larvae, thirty thousand sea urchin eggs and six thousand starfish embryos. One carousel spun up, imitating the Earth’s gravity, and the other provided a gravity-free environment. The experiment had begun three hours after departing Earth orbit, when Jiang had injected a sperm concentrate into a container full of sea urchin eggs.

She had used a microscope to observe the effects of spaceflight on urchin embryo development. The study was designed to provide insight into the causes and cures of osteoporosis and muscular dystrophy. And she followed the calcium formation of a mussel’s shell, to shed light on the bone depletion suffered by humans in space. The creatures’ unusual swimming and feeding patterns, carefully recorded on video, were studied to provide pointers on how the oceans’ fish populations might better be managed. Jiang also spent much time studying the embryos of starfish. The purpose was to learn how to predict and control early birth defects in humans. The embryo of a starfish, in early stages of development, was remarkably similar to that of a human…

The bioscience program was genuine work. But it was essentially a blind: a misdirection, intended to confuse anyone following her mission suspiciously.

In some senses she was lying, and she felt obscure shame about that: to come all the way out here, fifteen times as far as the Moon was from Earth — an astounding technical feat, especially for a country which a century ago had been an agricultural backwater — and lie!

And yet, she felt, on another level she was telling a greater truth, a truth that transcended the exigencies of her mission.

Earth was not alone. Earth and Moon swam together through a sea of objects, of varying sizes, called NEOs: near-Earth objects, also called Earth-crossing asteroids.

The object of Jiang’s mission was known as NEO 2002OA, discovered in 2002. It was a mountain-sized rock, covered with impact craters and a regolith — a pulverized surface layer — like the Moon’s. It was on a course which would bring it within a million miles of Earth: just four times the distance from Earth to Moon, only some one hundredth of the distance from Earth to sun.

There were three hundred thousand NEOs a hundred yards across or bigger, and some two thousand half a mile across or bigger. Some were rocky, some metallic, others rich in organics.

Earth sat at the bottom of the deepest gravity well between sun and Jupiter. Over billions of years, twenty percent of all the NEOs would impact the planet.

It was undoubtedly true, she had learned, that if humanity was to have a long-term future, leaving the planet and dispersing was the only option. Space travel was no leisure luxury for a rich world, but essential for the survival of the species.

Perhaps, she comforted herself, her mission — successful or otherwise — might spur a greater awareness of the hazardous environment within which humanity had, perforce, made its home; perhaps, in some ultimate long term, she might actually prove the savior of humanity.

Perhaps she might be remembered as mankind’s greatest hero.

Rather than as its supreme villain.

Three days from her closest approach, with the asteroid grown massive in her window, she saw the flashes of the drone warheads which had preceded her.

The weapons had emplaced themselves close to the asteroid, though away from its surface. The flashes looked like miniature dawns. They were immediately surrounded by surges of debris from the asteroid’s pulverized surface, which rocketed out in well-defined jets, some fragments glowing white-hot.

There was, of course, no heat, no sound, no concussion wave transmitted from the massive explosions — though her heart quailed as she looked into the fusion light.

She carefully observed the explosions, and prepared to compute their consequences.

The mission philosophy was simple. The smallest impulse required to deflect that rocky body was more than could feasibly be delivered by a single weapon. Too large an explosion, besides, could shatter the object, removing its usefulness.

Therefore a string of automated weapons had been launched by Long March boosters over the days preceding Jiang’s own launch. The necessary impulse would be applied, not by one large detonation, but by a series of smaller ones. Tianming was distinguished only in carrying the last — albeit the largest — of the weapon set, to deliver the final tweak to the asteroid’s new trajectory.

The mission design offered a chance for more accuracy, besides. The asteroid still had to travel many millions of miles along its new path. The successive explosions could be used to herd the asteroid closer towards the required final trajectory. The last detonation was, of course, the final opportunity for adjustment.

It was explained to Jiang, carefully, that China lacked the facility for sufficiently precise deep space tracking of either the asteroid or an unmanned spacecraft, and the robotic expertise to enable such a craft to navigate itself, sufficiently precisely. Only a human navigator — such as herself — using optical techniques on the spot could make the precise measurements of the deflection achieved of the asteroid by the unmanned probes, and then emplace the final weapon sufficiently precisely to achieve the last elements of the required deflection.

Such was her purpose.

It was also explained, equally carefully, that time, resource deficiencies and mission constraints were such that it had not been possible to provide a separable delivery system for the weapon itself. Nor any return or reentry provisions for the crew. That is, it was necessary for Tianming to remain in place during the explosion.

This was a factor which she took into account, in the course of her decision to accept the mission.

To fly in space:to venture once again beyond the atmosphere, to become the first Chinese to venture beyond low Earth orbit, the first Chinese to spend a hundred days in space — for that, she had, to her own surprise, been willing to exchange everything. Her life.

Even her place in history.

Jiang Ling was a spaceflight junkie.

It was even possible, she mused, that had this flight been offered even to some of the one hundred frustrated American astronauts, dispersing slowly from Houston, some of them may have accepted, so great was the lure of returning to the secret place, to space.

And having made her bargain, she would, of course, complete her mission.

It was conceivable that the detonations would be observed from the United States itself, and elsewhere. If they were, the Party had a further plausible cover story, she knew: that the explosions were being used in a scientific analysis of the asteroid’s structure.

The light faded rapidly. The debris cloud dispersed quickly — or rather, the asteroid’s new orbit took it away from the fragments blown out of it by the weapons.

The dosimeter aboard Tianming indicated that the radiation dose she had already taken exceeded nominal safety limits.

Jiang Ling smiled.

She picked up her optical navigation gear — a sextant with a simple telescope — and began to study the new position of the asteroid.

On the last day before closest approach, she found it more difficult than before to comply with the order to complete her three hours’ cycling.

For her final broadcast she chose to feature the aquarium. She positioned the camera so that it focused on the apparatus, and then moved so that her own face was in the shot, close to the aquarium. For the benefit of the video camera, she made a show of peering into the microscope; her vision filled with blue water light. She spoke in her broadcast about these little creatures being her fellow passengers aboard Tianming.

It was a little corny, but it contained the essential truth. Somewhere in the milky-blue images of squirming sea urchins and eerily human starfish embryos, somewhere in this drop of the primeval sea which she had carried with her, so far from Earth, there was a sense of unity with all life, a hope of salvation.

She was not alone, even here, so far from the planet which had spawned her; she was still as one with all the creatures of the world.

Her greatest regret, in fact — which grew as 2002OA loomed — was that the thousands of creatures in this aquarium could not hope to survive the events to come.

Jiang Ling could no longer see Earth, Moon or sun.

On this, the hundredth day, the dark hide of 2002OA slid past the small window of Tianming.

It was as if she was flying over some miniature Moon, she thought. The surface was so pierced and broken by craters of all sizes that it was impossible to tell, by eye, how far away it was; she might have been in an Apollo spacecraft sailing over the surface of the Moon, sixty miles below, or peering through some camera at a plaster mockup, just out of arm’s reach.

The spacecraft was in the shadow of the asteroid now, and only the spotlights of Tianming illuminated the surface, less than a mile from the craft: she fired her camera through the window, and the digitized photographs of churned regolith were sent immediately to the ground stations.

She heard the clatter of solenoids, felt the judder of the craft as it was pushed by squirts of the automatic reaction control system.

She was beyond the useful reach of her optical navigation; now, the automatic systems of the spacecraft had come into their own — particularly the radar, which would determine Tianming’s distance from the asteroid surface, and match it to the ground-based calculations using her astronomical observations of the asteroid’s new path.

For optimal yield, the warhead required a standoff detonation, with the warhead placed forty percent of the object’s radius above the surface. There, the weapon could irradiate an ideal thirty percent of the surface of 2002OA.

The weapon had been engineered to maximize its production of neutrons, which would be absorbed by the top few inches of the crust. The irradiated shell would heat, expand and spill away, thus imparting a rocket-like stress wave impulse to the asteroid.

From now on, until the mission reached its conclusion, Jiang Ling was a passenger.

She found the thought oddly restful.

She went to her sleeping cupboard, and retrieved the small brass bell. She rattled it, and the small clapper rang against the wall of the bell, and she stared into the corpulent, smiling face of ta laorenjia.

She ate a final breakfast. She found the ground crew had packed a special, final meal: duck, pork with rice, and even a small bulb of ckemshu, a rice liqueur.

She ate with relish. Then she carefully tidied away the plate and cutlery and enclosed microgravity cups.

It was hard to imagine that in a few minutes none of this familiar cabin and environment would exist; it was right to behave as if that were not so.

According to her mission clock, the final moment was mere seconds away. She had requested that the cabin camera be disabled, and that the radio link be kept silent.

She didn’t want a countdown. And she had said her good-byes.

The last person she had embraced, on Earth, was her mother.

A little before detonation, Jiang Ling pressed her fists into the sockets of her eyes.

She saw the complete bone structure of her hands, like an X-ray, drenched in pink light.

There was a moment of heat—

It was Benacerraf who found the methane vent.

As, despite her mountain-top adventure, she continued to ban any EVA beyond the walk-back limit, Rosenberg had set up a systematic program to take atmospheric and surface samples from the area around Tartarus they could reach in a couple of hours. So he sent Benacerraf in her snowshoes striking across the featureless, dull ground to the north-west. After a couple of miles, as he had instructed, she filled up her little sample bottles and started to return.

As she returned — taking a sighting on the white crest of Mount Othrys, visible as a hulking silhouette through the haze — she came upon a place where the gumbo appeared to have a different consistency, a lighter color.

She stopped, right in the middle of the discoloration patch.

She dug at the gumbo with her snowshoe, and bent down to take a closer look. The light was even worse than usual; they were coming to the end of one of the eight-day-long Titan “days,” and the methane overcast was heavy. But even in the dim, dried-blood light, she could see there was something unusual about the gumbo here. It was peppered by big, flattened bubbles. And as she watched, a fresh bubble emerged from under the tholin, spreading and flattening, streaks of color swimming in its surface.

She must have walked right over this patch on the way out. Whatever this was, it was out of the ordinary, surely the kind of thing Rosenberg had them out here looking for.

She bent, awkwardly, and took fresh sample bottles from her EMU pockets. She took a scraping of the gumbo itself, the air above the gumbo, and — with reasonable skill, she thought — managed to insert the plastic needle of a syringe into a bubble without breaking the sticky meniscus, and was able to draw out the uncontaminated gases within.

She straightened up, labelled the bottles, noted her location and walked on.

Back at Tartarus, inside the scuffed, patched-up, shack-like interior of the hab module, Rosenberg was distracted. He was busy trying to rebuild a balky nutrient pump from the CELSS farm, and he told her to store her sample bottles and he’d check them when he had time.

Meanwhile, Angel was having one of his bad days. He raged around the hab module, frustrated at his inability to perform the simplest task unaided. He railed at the equipment, at the assholes at NASA who wouldn’t speak to them any more, at his crewmates.

For all the difficulties his presence posed on even the simplest EVA, it was outside the cramped, battered, stale confines of the hab module that Angel seemed most stable. The opportunity to get him outside hadn’t come up for a couple of days, though, and now they were likely to be shut in through the eight-day Titan night. And already, Benacerraf thought, they were paying the price.

She made a meal for Angel, and sat him down in the Apollo couches. He rambled about his life, his space missions, his career, his father, even his sexual experiences. She sat and endured.

Listening to him was an easy safety valve.

Rosenberg padded around them in house shoes improvised from Beta-cloth scraps, and got on with his work on the pump. He didn’t actually do anything to help her with Angel; it was clear that as far as Rosenberg was concerned, Angel was Benacerraf’s problem, a waste of resources who ought to be pushed out the airlock.

It took Rosenberg two hours to get around to those anomalous samples.

Then he came bustling in from the Spacelab, shouting about an immediate EVA.

Benacerraf glanced uneasily at Angel. But he seemed to be heading into one of his inward-looking, passive phases. He was rocking to and fro in his couch, his right leg tapping rapidly, his head turning to and fro. She had learned to read Angel’s moods; if he stayed in this state, he was so shut-in it was beyond the power even of Rosenberg’s noisy, unstructured ranting to irritate him.

Rosenberg was still talking about going out.

“Slow down, Rosenberg,” she said. “You know we’ve avoided EVAs at night.”

“I know,” he said. “I know. But this is exceptional. We have an opportunity, right now, and we don’t know when it will recur. We’ll miss out on it if we wait seven or eight days for the fucking sun to come up.”

“What opportunity?”

“Paula, I analysed those samples you brought back. The anomalous tholin, the bubbling—”

“I remember.”

“You know what I found, in the sample you took from within the bubble?” He grinned. “Guess.”

“Don’t play games, Rosenberg.”

“Methane,” he said. “Almost pure methane gas. You see?”

She thought it over. “No. No, I don’t get it. The air is full of methane. We even produce it ourselves. Why should we care enough about methane to risk our necks out there in the dark?”

“Because of where the methane comes from,” he said rapidly. “It has to be from an underground reservoir. There are probably pockets of methane scattered all through the bedrock ice, though not all so close to the surface… It has to be an intrusion of the magma, the deep ammonia-water, which is forcing that methane to the surface now. And if that’s so, the site you found is one of the best possibilities for finding traces of ammono-analogue biology. Short of dropping into the caldera on Othrys, we—”

“Woah.” She held up her hands again. “Tell me slowly.”

“I’m talking about life,Paula,” he said softly. “Titan life: life beyond Earth. That methane vent represents one of our best chances of detecting it. If we sit in here on our butts, we may miss it.” He was struggling to be patient, she saw. “Do you get it? I’m not interested in the methane for itself. I’m interested in the ammonia-water magma.”

“Because—”

“Because if we’re going to find life anywhere, ammonia-analogue life, it’s in the fluid of the ancient oceans. Where liquid ammonia is still available, as a solvent. And that’s bubbling up out of the ground, a couple of miles away.”

Angel turned his ruined face to Rosenberg. “Titan life, huh. So, what use is that? Can we eat the shit?” He shook his head, mumbling irritably, and retreated inward to his crooning.

“Actually,” Benacerraf said drily, “he has a point, Rosenberg. This is science, not survival. I don’t think we should put ourselves in a life-threatening situation for—”

Rosenberg seemed to snap.

She’d never seen him so angry. He came up and loomed over her, screaming at her. “This is precisely the reason we came to Titan in the first place. We have to be able to do more than sit around in here recycling Bill’s piss and waiting to die. Paula, either you come out with me now, or I go out there myself. Right now.” There were flecks of spittle on his lip, and behind his glasses his red-rimmed eyes were staring.

She closed her eyes, and wished she was in her wardroom.

She was sick of juggling them, these two assholes, both as difficult as each other in their ways, both demanding that she soak it all up, run their lives for them.

…The news from Earth, sent up to them in digital packets by the last DSN dish at Goldstone, was there. More ecological decay, more flashpoint wars over crop failures and water shortages, more floods of refugees washing across the southern continents, more sabre-rattling between the Chinese and Maclachlan’s government. In a way, the Chinese issue scared her most. It was like the Cold War all over again. Except that she sensed those old bastards in Beijing meant it, in a way the Kremlin never had.

Well, maybe they could actually do some good up here. Maybe news of life outside Earth might actually lift some hearts, down on the bleeding ground. As Rosenberg said, it was why they’d come here, after all.

“You win, Rosenberg. We’ll go.”

He backed off, trembling.

“But,” she said evenly, “it had better be worth it.”

Angel, blind face turning this way and that, cackled as he rocked.

They stepped outside the orbiter, emerging into the pitch dark of a Titan night.

Benacerraf insisted the two of them rope themselves together.

Rosenberg laughed at her. “For Christ’s sake, Paula. The tholin out west is as flat as a pancake for miles. What are you expecting to happen?”

She confronted him. “I don’t know. I’ve only taken a walk over a methane vent once before, and last time I didn’t know I was doing it. If we have to be out here at all, we take precautions. Take the damn rope, Rosenberg.”

He made noises of disgust. But he knotted the rope around his waist.

They set off into the deeper dark, north-westwards, preceded by circles of lamplight. Benacerraf led the way, trying to retrace her steps to the methane vent. The gumbo glistened, purple and black, in the white light of the lamps; it reminded Benacerraf of an open wound.

Somehow, Benacerraf thought, it was harder to walk into the dark, with the gumbo sucking at her snowshoes, and only unmarked desolation ahead of her, beyond the circles of lamp light. Her imagination seemed to be populating the empty darkness with vague demons, and she felt a gathering dread at the thought of proceeding further.

Perhaps, she thought with a stab of unwelcome sympathy, Bill Angel feels like this all the time: his isolation on this dead alien world compounded by being lost in the dark.

After a couple of miles, she slowed. “It was about here.”

Rosenberg cast about with his lamp. “The surface looks normal to me.” He started to unknot the rope at his waist. “We ought to separate,” he said. “We’ll halve the time it takes if we work independently. Now, if I take the—”

“Keep the rope on, Rosenberg.”

“Paula, that’s just not logical. It’s so inefficient.”

“Keep the rope on, or we go back right now. I mean it, Rosenberg. Ammonia life or no ammonia life.”

He groused like a kid. “Shit, Paula.” But he knotted the rope up again.

They began to search, working in widening circles around their starting position, the rope stretched to its maximum extent, their lamps throwing elliptical patches across the glistening, sticky gumbo.

It was more difficult than Benacerraf had expected; the colors of the gumbo were different in white, Earth-like lamplight, and the color changes she’d observed before were obscured. Rosenberg took to using his infra-red vision. The resolution was poorer than with the naked eye, but perhaps he could detect the temperature changes associated with the methane vent.

After a few minutes, Benacerraf found what looked like a series of small, circular craters, dug into the gumbo at her feet. When she looked more closely, she found the lamplight had deceived her, making her reverse the image in her mind’s eye; the “craters” were actually bubbles, pushing slowly up through the gumbo.

“Rosenberg,” she breathed. “I think I have it.”

He came over as fast as the gumbo would permit. He stood over the bubbling patch. “My God,” he said. “You’re right, Paula. We did it. What a discovery.”

He unloaded his sampling gear from the pockets of his EMU. He took scrapings of the gumbo, and of the atmosphere within and above the methane bubbles. He assembled a hollow tube from sections, to take a core sample. He hoped that the lower levels of the core would contain materials soaked in liquid ammonia.

Benacerraf worked patiently at the core, twisting the improvised handle at the top, coaxing the core into the ground. It was difficult even to hold the handle against the stiffness of her thick gloves. She could feel the unevenness of her gloves’ heating elements rubbing against her palm, and soon she thought her fingertips, where they were scraping against the material of her gloves, were starring to bleed.

k took as much effort to drag the core out of the clinging ground as to insert it. When it was free, Rosenberg started to dismantle the core sections.

A thunderous roar, deep bass, sounded through Benacerraf’s helmet. Benacerraf could feel deep vibrations, as though the source of the noise was right beneath her feet.

Rosenberg said, “I think—”

There was a boom, like a sonic shock.

A few yards to Rosenberg’s right, a grey cloud was erupting. She turned that way to focus her lamp light. The cloud was droplets of gumbo, thrown up from the ground, subsiding slowly back to the surface.

The ground had collapsed beneath the cloud, forming a roughly circular crater maybe six feet across. Benacerraf thought she could make out a gush of gas — methane, she guessed — pulsing out of the hole.

“Holy shit,” Benacerraf breathed.

“The whole area is unstable,” Rosenberg said quickly. He was still working on the core. “We’re on some kind of crust over big methane bubbles. The methane venting might become explosive.”

Another shudder beneath Benacerraf’s feet. The ground shook again, and again. Another hole, bigger than the first, opened up to her right.

“Let’s go, Rosenberg.”

He was bending to the surface, scooping up the sections of the core sample. “I just need to collect this.”

“Leave it, for Christ’s sake.”

More crumps and bangs; the ground shuddered again. Rosenberg was still fussing with his samples.

“Rosenberg! Move!” She tugged at the rope, yelling at him.

He straightened up, clutching one core sample section which he shoved in a pocket of his EMU.

They started to make their way back out of the vent area, stepping clumsily, casting their lamp light around. They followed their footsteps back out towards Tartarus; the footsteps showed up as a trail of shallow, infilling gumbo craters.

A gush of methane erupted from the ice, just to Benacerraf’s left. She ducked. The noise was so all-engulfing it felt as if the sound was passing both underfoot and overhead.

And then a crater, a distorted circle ten feet across and steaming with methane vapor, opened up between Benacerraf and Rosenberg. There seemed no limit to the depth of the craters in their lamplight, as if the exposed pits reached to the heart of the world.

There was a feeling of hollowness beneath her; she thought she could hear echoes of the imploding ice and gumbo being returned from some huge chamber beneath her. She had the vertiginous feeling that she was crossing some fragile bridge, over a chasm.

The randomness terrified her. With every step she half-expected a crater to open up beneath her, or Rosenberg. Either would probably be enough to kill them both.

Proceeding cautiously, probing with their lamps, skirting places where the gumbo seemed to be bubbling, it took them an hour to cross a stretch of tholin that had taken five minutes on the way out.

Rosenberg took more than a week, working in his miniature lab, to process the samples he brought back from the methane vent. Benacerraf didn’t disturb him; Rosenberg was reclusive to the point of secrecy about work in progress.

But he didn’t look happy, as far as she could see.

Eventually, after a few hours’ work in the CELSS farm in Apollo, she came into the hab module to find Rosenberg dictating into a softscreen.

“…CH, CN and CC functional groups are evident in the imaginary part of the refractive index, as expected from the gas phase products that are the tholin precursors. Acid hydrolysis yields an array of racemic amino acids, both biological and non-biological, plus much urea. See Table Twelve. Amino acid yields are about one percent by mass of the tholin; their precursors appear to be formed by chain-addition reactions of the most abundant gas-phase species. Two-step laser mass spectrometry reveals ten to minus four grains per gram of two-four ring polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons; larger amounts of higher PAHs may be present. The volatile component of the tholin was examined by sequential and nonsequential pyrolytic gas chromatography and mass spectrometry; over one hundred products were detected — Table Thirteen — including saturated and unsaturated aliphatic hydrocarbons, nitriles, PAHs, amines, pyrroles, pyrazines, pyridines, pyrimidines and adenine…”

Benacerraf placed a hand on his shoulder. “Rosenberg,” she said. “Talk to me.”

He broke off. Distracted, his thin face lined and unhappy, he shook his head. “Hell, Paula.” He went to the hab module’s galley and came back with a cup of water; they sat on Apollo couches, side by side.

She was going to have to be patient, she knew, “Tell me.”

“Look,” he said. “You know the theory. Maybe life formed here, in the ancient ammonia ocean. The ammono life would burn methane in nitrogen, producing ammonia and cyanogen, just as we burn sugars in oxygen and give off water and carbon dioxide. Maybe it still exists in the aqueous ammonia in the mantle. Or maybe it’s at least dormant in there, in some kind of spore, waiting to be revived.”

“So…”

“So I tried to stimulate biological activity in the mantle samples we brought back in that core sample.”

“And?”

He rubbed his face, looking defeated. “I found a lot of cyanogen. The stuff ammonia life would breathe out. More than you’d predict from straightforward physico-chemical processes. And a number of other products which I expected as ammono analogues of terrestrial biochemicals. Aminines, which correspond to fatty acids. Ammono-lipids, like ammotto-tristearin. Plenty of complex alpha-ammoamidines, analogues of alpha-amino acids. Carbohydrate analogues like polyaminopiperidines. Ammono-nucleic acids, like a guanine analogue. Actually, I’ve seen a lot of exotic chemistry here; we didn’t even know if such compounds would be chemically stable at these temperatures…”

“My God,” she said. “If I understand all that, then you were right. Evidence of life.”

“Yes,” he said. “But it’s all four billion years old.” He got out of his coach, stamped over to the lab area and came back with a small phial of muddy mantle material. “Paula, when I stimulated the organics in here with ammonia and nitrogen, there was no increase in the cyanogen concentration. The stuff is inert. Nothing is breathing.”

“Then the ammono-biological products you found—”

“They were fossils. Paula, there must have been ammono life here once, in the primeval oceans. It had hundreds of millions of years; perhaps it even reached a high degree of complexity. But it couldn’t survive the change, the freezing over of the ocean, the plummeting temperatures. All that’s left now is what I found: chemical fossils, the decomposed elements of a life that was snuffed out billions of years ago. Just like that old rock from fucking Mars.

“You called tholin the stuff of life.” Now he threw the sample to the floor of the hab module. It shattered, and its muddy contents splashed over the plastic. “You were wrong. There is only death here.”

So, she thought, this is the end of Rosenberg’s dream: in a sense, the reason we all came here, beyond the geopolitics and the thwarted ambitions, and whatever personal flaws impelled us out of Earth’s atmosphere…

Titan is dead. We’re orphans, in the Solar System. Now, there’s nothing left for us to do, but endure, and fear for Earth.

The ancient ammonia bubbled, evaporating rapidly, and soon Benacerraf could smell its pungent stink.

…Dead, she thought. Or maybe just deep-frozen?

As far as Barbara Fahy was concerned, it only took a couple of hours for the world to fall apart.

She was summoned to Washington. She was to attend a hastily convened briefing on 2002OA with Hartle and other Air Force officers in the Batcave, the Space Command center buried deep beneath the streets of DC.

She had to fly by T-38 — piloted by a sullen ex-astronaut — as air traffic control was out, it seemed, right across the continent, and civilian flights were grounded. As she flew over DC she could see the problems, even from the air: whole city blocks without power, fires burning uncontrolled in the poorer areas.

The Chinese, it was whispered, were screwing with our computers. From here on, it looked as if the scuttlebutt was true.

She was whisked by chopper to NASA Headquarters. There another car was waiting for her, and it took her a couple of blocks across town.

The traffic was lousy. All the lights were out. The big softscreen billboards were all dead, too; they hung like black wings on the sides of the buildings lining her route. Even the little image-tattoos on the faces of the street kids had turned black, like burns.

She arrived at another anonymous-looking Government building, and was hurried through heavy security and into an elevator. The elevator was just a box of steel, its surfaces polished. The security was tough even here: there were video cameras mounted on the walls, watching her, and an armed MP standing discreetly at the back of the car.

The elevator fell rapidly. Fahy, clutching her softscreen and scribbled notes, almost stumbled, disoriented; it was like being back in the T-38 again, pulling Gs.

The MP was only a kid, she thought, surely younger than thirty. His blue eyes were black-rimmed, and she wondered if he’d had any sleep recently. He was probably as afraid as she was. More so, because he couldn’t understand as much of what was happening as she did.

On impulse, she asked: “What’s your name, son?”

He looked at her, puzzled. “Ma’am?” His vowels had the broad richness of a Texan. His hand, she noted, had gone automatically to the butt of his pistol.

“Never mind,” she said.

When she emerged from the elevator, she found herself facing a gigantic, intimidating logo: a shield, studded with stars; a stylized planet ringed by solid-looking orbital hoops, a simple delta-wing spacecraft overlaid before it. It was, Fahy knew, the shield of the Air Force Space Command.

The MP hurried her through steel-walled corridors. His heels clattered on the metallic floor, his gun always visible. Fahy had to half-run to keep up.

After a couple of turns she’d lost her orientation. The lighting came from dazzling, grey-white floods embedded in the ceilings, so that the illumination was colorless, flattening. Everyone she encountered looked deathly pale, as if drained of blood. There were no colors here, no smells. It was like being inside a huge machine. The rooms were crammed with information technology: huge wall-mounted softscreens, printers, telecommunications gear; earnest young Air Force officers, many of them bespectacled, labored at terminals.

Machine or not, she sensed panic.

They arrived at a small, compact briefing room. A single table stretched the length of the room; it was oak, its surface polished smooth, a bizarre touch of luxury in this dehumanized cavern.

She had arrived in the middle of a briefing. It was a chaotic hubbub.

Al Hartle sat at the far end of the table. Gareth Deeke sat alongside him, his eyes hidden by his mirrored glasses. There were several others here, mostly men, mostly heavy-set and middle-aged. Some wore service uniforms, mostly from the U.S. armed forces, but there were also representatives from the military establishments of Canada, Quebec, New Columbia, Idaho. There were even a couple of Russian officers: evidently the embodiment of some post-Cold War strategic tie-up between the U.S. and post-Soviet Russia, a new cooperative understanding as the former adversaries banded together in the face of a newly hostile and baffling world.

Anyhow it was quite an assembly, a representation of the military establishments of two continents.

Around the walls of the room, framing the group at the table, a series of young officers sat at compact workstations, the glow of their softscreens illuminating their earnest, smooth faces. She could see information flowing in continually over the surface of the soft-screens, and occasionally scribbled notes were passed to the heavyweights at the main table. Network cables lay across the floor, roughly anchored here and there with duct tape. Jackets had been draped over the backs of chairs, ties were roughly loosened, and a pall of blue-grey smoke hung over the center of the room.

There was a stench of stale sweat, of too much aftershave. Of fear.

Oddly, she found she welcomed the body stink. At least, she thought, you could tell there were living human beings in this place of metal and plastic.

Fahy was waved to a seat.

Hartle clapped his hands, and the hubbub died a little. “Let’s try and get some kind of overview here,” he said. “Gareth. What’s the most significant item we have, in your view, right now?”

Deeke didn’t hesitate. “As far as the President is concerned, it must be the Wall Street bomb. The physical damage wasn’t important, Al. In fact it was just a suitcase bomb. The point of it was the electromagnetic pulse it delivered. Al, it knocked out everything: bank transfer networks, stock and bond markets, commodity trading systems, credit card networks, telephone and data transmission lines, Quotron machines… We’re looking at financial chaos, a meltdown of the global finance system. All from one suitcase bomb.

“General, we have two hundred million computers tying us together through an array of land and satellite-based communication systems. We thought we were protected. We weren’t. The nodes of our government and commercial computer systems are so poorly shielded that it’s been a chicken run for the enemy, or their agents. And in our systems themselves, even the most secure, we have evidence of the work of crackers — malevolent hackers — and cruise viruses, targeted at our vulnerable points. Al, at this moment I don’t think we can trust any of the information we do have coming in here, or even our weapons targeting and arming systems.”

“All right,” Hartle snapped. “What else?”

“We’ve lost our satellites,” another officer said bluntly.

“How? Anti-satellite strikes?”

“ASATs aren’t necessary,” Deeke said. “It’s easier and cheaper to soft-kill a satellite: damage, distort, even reprogram the information it processes and transmits. You can jam, intercept, spoof, hit the ground stations, break into the comms networks… Al, this is knowledge warfare. We have to assume that there are troop movements, going on right now. Launches of their CSS-2 IRBMs. Stuff we can’t see any more—”

“Knowledge warfare, horseshit. I’ll tell you what this is,” Hartle said. This is an electronic Pearl Harbor. The Red Chinese have blinded us. They’re doing to us what we did to them over Taiwan, back in ’12. We just didn’t think big enough, is all; we never thought they would attempt this—”

“And of course we have a rather larger problem,” Deeke said mildly.

Hartle turned to Fahy.

“Miss Fahy,” he said, glowering at her. “Welcome to hell. Now, tell us about 2002OA.”

Fahy, nervous, rumbling, stood up and walked to the head of the table, opposite Hartle. “2002OA is a NEO. A near-Earth object, an asteroid. We have four dedicated NEO search programs. Three in the northern hemisphere, one in the south. The U.S. has been running planet-crossing asteroid surveys for four decades now out of Mount Palomar, Kitt Peak and the Lowell Observatory. The surveys use photographic methods, with some upgrade to electronic methods. Palomar alone is responsible for the discovery of one-third of the NEO population known today. All these observatories are situated in the south-west of north America, and so cannot reach southern declinations. In response, a program called the Anglo-Australian Near-Earth Asteroid Survey was initiated in the 19908…”

“So,” Hartle snapped, “where the fuck is 2002OA?”

She fumbled with her softscreen, working through the presentation she had prepared, at last bringing up the image she wanted: a pencil of possible orbits, fanning out from 2002OA’s present position. The orbits enveloped the Earth.

“The orbital elements of 2002OA are not precisely determined, yet. For one thing it is only visible from one NEO tracking station, the one in Australia, though we’re trying to bring more resources to bear. It’s possible, but not certain, that 2002OA will collide with Earth. We certainly can’t be specific about where, precisely, in geographic terms. The orbital data is too fragmentary at present to be able to—”

Hartle closed his eyes. “Which hemisphere?”

“I can’t tell you that, sir.”

Deeke said, “NORAD and NASA are refining their projections all the time, Al.”

Hartle said, “But if we can’t even figure out where it is heading, how was it possible for the fucking Chinese to aim it?”

Deeke shrugged. “By placing a spacecraft on the spot. By doing navigation from there, they could achieve much greater precision. Maybe they even sent up a man to do it, General. After all, they aren’t scrupulous about spending human lives.”

“And what damage is this fucker going to do to us?”

“General, we think the Chinese miscalculated,” Fahy said, flicking through the projections her staff had prepared. “2002OA is a big rock. Bigger than they need, if they just wanted to strike at the U.S. We think they intended some kind of glancing blow, or maybe to calve off a piece of the rock. Then we’d face localized destruction, maybe something like a nuclear winter. A Tunguska rock on New York. A Meteor Crater where Washington is. We think that was the plan. But 2002OA is too large. Instead, we may be looking at some kind of Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary impact—”

Hartle turned to Deeke. “What the fuck?”

“A dinosaur killer, General,” Deeke said softly.

There was a moment of silence.

Hartle said to Fahy, “So tell me how we shoot down this motherfucker.”

She rumbled through her notes. “In general, the strategy for dealing with incoming objects requires spacecraft capable of rendezvousing with a threatening NEO and deflecting it by incrementing its velocity with a delta-vee — that is, an impulse — sufficient to cause them to miss the Earth. There are two generic strategies: remote interdiction, when the collision is predicted several orbital periods away, and terminal interception — when the collision is imminent, with the projectile less than one astronomical unit away — that is, days away from impact — and closing. Remote interdiction requires relatively small delta-vees, terminal interception much larger. In both cases, a deflection velocity is applied sufficient to cause it to drift from its original trajectory by at least one Earth radius. In cases of terminal interception it is best to apply the impulse perpendicularly to the projectile’s motion, which imparts an eccentricity to its orbit. The deflection delta-vee required is inversely proportional to the distance from Earth. And because of this—”

“Jesus Christ,” Hartle said. His body was unmoving as he watched her, as if carved from granite, his contempt etched on his face.

Deeke said, “Tell us about Clementine, Ms Fahy.”

“Right…” Fahy scanned ahead through the slides on her soft-screen, and began stumbling through a hasty presentation on a space mission called Clementine II.

Clementine had been an experimental 1990s deep-space mission cooked up by NASA and the Air Force Space Command. Clementine’s primary purpose had been to serve as a test-bed for the performance of advanced defence technologies in deep space, up to ten million miles from Earth. But it was also a test of techniques for asteroid interception. It had been sent to close rendezvous with three asteroids and had been equipped to fire probes — yard-long cylindrical missiles — into the asteroids’ surface. In the event, Clementine had failed after the first rendezvous, but that first mock-interception had gone well.

“Clementine was essentially target practice,” Fahy said. “It was criticized by the science community for that reason—”

“Fuck the science,” Hartle said. “Why the hell didn’t we follow this up?”

Fahy felt even more nervous. “Sir, the scientists won the day, in the end. They argued that the money would be better spent on ground-based instruments that could detect an Earth-bound incoming. Better to survey the problem, rather than try flying spaceborne weaponry at this stage. Then there was opposition from the liberal lobby, who argued that the build-up of a deflection capability might be a simple cover for the continuation of weapons programs, in the wake of the end of the Cold War, by vested interests: the military labs, the defence suppliers. Carl Sagan at Cornell was vocal in—”

“Carl Sagan,” Hartle growled. “Miss Fahy, for once in your goddamn life, get to the point. Listen up. Right now money is no object, for NASA. I’ll give you what you want: Delta IVs to launch up as many nukes as you could wish for, all the ground-based resources you ask for. Now. Tell me about 2002OA. What options do we have for deflecting this goddamn incoming?”

She frowned. “I’m sorry, sir. I thought you knew. We don’t have any options.”

Hartle seemed baffled rather than angry. “There is always an option, damn it.”

“Not in this case. We detected it too late. We’re already in the terminal interception phase. Right now, 2002OA is only four times as far away as the Moon. The delta-vee we would have to apply is more than three hundred feet per second. It is impossible for us to achieve such a deflection, no matter what we threw at it. The best we could achieve would be to break the rock up. But then you’d have a multiple impact instead of one, along with an immense cloud of dust and debris hitting the upper atmosphere…”

Gareth Deeke said, “Like it or not, we no longer have the Delta IVs in the inventory anyhow, Al. We’ve run down too far. We just don’t have the launch capability any more.”

Hartle’s nicotine-stained fingers drummed at the table. “You’re telling me we can’t shoot this thing down?”

“No, sir. Of course we don’t know for sure if it’s going to hit Earth anyhow.”

“Let’s start talking about what we do if it does. Gareth, are we prepared to strike at the Chinese? Should we launch before the impact? And what—”

An aide walked in, a girl. She walked towards Hartle. He watched her approach, impassive, his face like a piece of Mount Rushmore. Her gait was awkward, Fahy thought, her steps uneven, as if she were close to fainting.

“Sir,” she said. “We heard from NORAD. They have a fix on the incoming’s ground zero…” The girl officer started to cry, big salty drops rolling down her cheeks.

Everyone was standing now; orders were shouted back and forth.

The Atlantic,she heard. The Atlantic.

Two young officers had clustered around Al Hartle. “Come on, sir; we have to get you out of here, over to NORAD. There’s a chopper waiting…”

Holy shit,Fahy thought. They got confirmation. This isn’t just some military wet-dream fantasy of Al Hartle’s. It’s real; it’s going to happen.

I’m going to die.

Holy shit.

Jake Hadamard parked at the foot of the Vehicle Assembly Building. His car was the only one in the lot.

When he looked up at the face of the VAB, it was like peering up at a cliff. In the flat morning sunlight he could see that the wall was heavily weathered, streaked with seagull guano, and there was even some lichen, he saw, busily burrowing into the face of the VAB, as if it was some immense tombstone. It was a little difficult to believe that modern humans, in some epochal moment of madness, had built such a monument.

He had a sudden, jarring sense that history was going to end, here, today.

He walked away from the VAB, towards the press stand.

The uncompromising old wooden bleacher was evidently abandoned now, its roof broken open to the daylight, dune grass colonizing the lower levels. He climbed a few steps and found a seat; he brushed it clear of dirt and sand and sat down, looking east.

He was looking towards the ocean, across the Banana River, and, beyond a treeline, towards Launch Complex 39. The sun, still early-morning low, was bright in his eyes. The press portakabins that had once stood here had long since been hauled away, and the other relics of human launches — the gigantic countdown clock, the flagpole — were gone too. Nothing remained but obscure concrete podiums and platforms, already crumbling under the assault of sea and vegetation.

Beyond the treeline, on the other side of the river, he could see the two LC-39 launch complexes, side by side, blocky mechanical towers blue-misted by distance. Now 39-B was all but demolished; little had been left after the scrap teams had moved in but a shell of rusting iron set on a concrete platform.

An effort had been made to preserve 39-A, however; for the benefit of the tourist trade, Disney-Coke had erected a gigantic carbon fiber mockup of a Saturn V to stand alongside the launch gantry. It was easily visible now, a slim white tower, more than three hundred and sixty feet tall, tapering up from the flaring fins of the S-IC first stage, all the way to the pencil-thin escape rocket at the tip of the dummy Apollo spacecraft at the apex. But it was unpainted, many of the details missing, so that it looked like a child’s unfinished model.

The sun was to his right and in his eyes, already hot. Hadamard was dressed in a suit, his tie loosely knotted. He adjusted his sunglasses for greater opacity.

He wondered if he ought to put on some sunblock.

He checked his watch. Well, if what he’d heard from his contacts inside NASA and NORAD was correct, he wouldn’t have long to wait. He could risk doing without the sunblock.

Rosenberg and Benacerraf huddled together at the galley end of the hab module. The door to Bill Angel’s quarters was closed; there was no sound from within.

Even so, Rosenberg and Benacerraf were talking in whispers.

“Sixty miles,” Rosenberg said. “It’s not so far. If we could manage ten miles a day, we could be there and back in a couple of weeks…”

Rosenberg was in a mood Benacerraf had learned to recognize, and mistrust: a mood of excitement, in which he would be carried away by some new idea.

The trouble was, around here it was only Rosenberg who came up with any ideas at all.

“Tell me again,” she said. “You’re sure this is a carbonaceous chondrite meteorite crater?”

“As sure as I can be.” Rosenberg had spotted the crater, punched into the border of the big Cronos plateau, in Cassini orbital radar imaging. “The size is the thing. Look, Paula, the nature of the impacting bolide determines the cratering profile. The most common type out here, far from the inner System, will be weak, icy, cometary bodies. If an object is small and weak, it’s going to break up in Titan’s thick atmosphere. For a bolide of a given yield strength you have a minimum radius below which you shouldn’t find any craters. For the ice bolides, that comes at around thirty miles. The stronger the material, the smaller the crater it can create.”

“I get it. And the crater you’ve found on Cronos—”

“ — is about twenty miles wide. Below the turndown limit for the icy bodies. Carbonaceous chondrite meteorites would have four or five times the density, and a hundred times the internal strength.”

She tried to think it through. “So the crater you found can’t have been caused by a cometary-ice impact.”

“It’s possible, but unlikely.”

It was typical of Rosenberg to play the cautious scientist when he was asking her to make a decision that would put all their lives on the line.

“But it could be something else,” she said doggedly. “A stony or iron meteorite.”

“Yes, that’s possible. But the flux rates for objects like that, out here so far from the sun, are small,” he said. “Much smaller than at Earth. Really, Paula, a carbonaceous chondrite is the best explanation. And the crater I’ve found is the most likely chondrite crater for a few hundred miles. Paula, we’re lucky to have found something so close.”

She sighed. “So we have to go there.”

“You know it. Paula, you’ve seen the figures. We just aren’t able to achieve closure of the life support loops, particularly of the amino acids and some of the trace elements — sulphur, potassium, chlorine.

Even Titan itself can’t supply everything. So we have to look for manna from heaven, in the crater of a carbonaceous chondrite meteorite. “We need that kerogen.” He smiled, his thin face dreamy. “Before it fell out of the sky, the meteorite must have drifted around for five billion years, a fragment of the original circumsolar nebula. Food, cooked up in the interior of the first generation of stars…” This kind of stuff was what worried her. This was Rosenberg’s personal escape hatch, his way of retreating from the dull horrors of their life on Titan. Her worry was, what if there were other options for survival which he wasn’t considering, because he was caught up with the idea of digging out the celestial stuff of life from some crater on Cronos?

“A hundred and twenty miles, across the surface of Titan. My God, Rosenberg. Do you really think it’s feasible? The longest surface EVAs in NASA history were the last Moonwalks. Seven or eight hours outside the Lunar Module; a traverse of a few miles, every minute timelined, in those damn Lunar Rovers. All controlled from the ground, and all of it within a walk-back limit of the LM. Now, we’re going to have to figure out how to survive independently of Discovery for two weeks or more.”

He shrugged. “It will take some preparation. But I think it’s possible, Paula. We’ll need the sleds, of course, with food and water and stuff, and some kind of surface shelter. But remember we should be able to haul along a lot of mass, in the low gravity—”

“Rosenberg, we haven’t reached a crisis yet. Maybe we should wait.”

He looked confused. “What good would waiting do? We don’t have any smarter options. It’s better to attempt this now. While we’re still reasonably healthy. Before the equipment starts to wear out. Before the life support loops start failing.”

“You’ve worked this out, haven’t you, Rosenberg?”

“Paula, I really don’t think we have a choice,” he said seriously.

He started talking about more expeditions they could mount later. For instance to the crater of an iron meteorite. Maybe they could find some way to refine the metal, and…

She listened with weary patience. He was off in his dream-world of technology and science and achievement, that realm where all his schemes came to magical life, and where Tartarus became the hub of a spreading, glittering complex of science and technology.

None of it had anything to do with the real problem they faced about this EVA, she thought. Which was what to do with Bill Angel.

“El Dorado,” he was saying now. “That’s what we’ll call the crater.”

“Whatever you say, Rosenberg.”

In the chaos, it wasn’t difficult for Barbara Fahy to get out of the complex. She rode a steel elevator to the surface, and emerged into the early hours of a spring morning in Washington DC.

She checked her watch. It was nearly 6:00 a.m.; the briefings had gone on all night.

The streets were all but empty: there were a couple of street cleaners, a girl in a short skirt and inert image-tattoos making her way home, maybe from some club, one or two tense-looking office workers in suits, strutting anxiously towards their workplaces. The traffic lights were working, but randomly, it seemed to her.

She wondered where the President was this morning. Nowhere near here.

She walked.

She reached the Tidal Basin, and walked among the cherry trees near the Jefferson Memorial, around the reflecting pool walkway. The canopy of white blossoms filtered the morning light, so that it was like the glow of a skylight, shadowless, diffuse, warming.

She passed a small colony of homeless, huddled under paper and cardboard against the softscreen-coated wall of a bank. The softscreen shed flickers of light over clothes that had been reduced by rain and sunlight to shapeless, colorless pulp. But this morning there was no pattern to the softscreen’s display, just formless grey static.

Maybe, she thought, she should warn someone. But what was the point? Let them enjoy the morning. Let them sleep, if they could.

Maclachlan had said he’d sweep the homeless from the streets. At the end of two terms — and as Maclachlan aimed to change the Constitution to allow him to run for a third — there were more of them than ever. And malnutrition in the Bronx, and cholera in Georgia…

But, she thought, all these problems would soon be swept away, more rapidly and effectively than even Xavier Maclachlan, in his wildest dreams, could have planned.

She felt she’d lived through an immense paradox. After that steel cavern, she could understand why people felt that science was a terrible thing. Maybe even an evil thing. But the fact was that one nuke, in the right place at the right time, could have deflected this incoming, the Chinese rock. There was the paradox. What do we do when the dinosaur-killer comes? Accept it as inevitable? Throw philosophy books at it?

But in the end it was science and technology which had delivered the evil on their heads. The paradox deepened.

She just hoped there would be people around to debate this tomorrow.

According to the projections prepared by her staff, everything depended on the geometry of the impact.

A hell of a lot of kinetic energy would be released downwards, into the crust, and upwards, into the atmosphere, first as a vapor plume and then as an airblast. If there was an ocean strike there would be earthquakes: Richter eight or nine. A lot of dust and salt water would be injected into the middle atmosphere; nobody cared to guess what that would do to the weather. And they were going to get global oscillations of the atmosphere and ionosphere. Upper atmosphere heating, high intensity atmospheric disturbances. Hydrogen-mixing would wreck the ozone layer, for good and all. A lot of nitrogen would be burned, into nitrogen dioxide, nitric acid. Acid rain. And the high-speed plasma plumes from the shock, reaching up to the geomagnetic field, were going to play hell with the radiation belts…

Funny weather. Storms. Auroras. Lousy communications. Stunning sunsets, from all that dust. The skies would be spectacular.

Even if the impact itself wasn’t too severe, secondary effects could do a lot of damage. Nuclear waste repositories. Hydroelectric power stations and dams. Chemical plants. Nuclear power stations. She imagined a dozen Chernobyls, scattered along the eastern seaboard…

Still, it was possible humanity — even civilization — could survive the impact itself and its consequences. But then, everything would depend on the war that would surely follow, when the Chinese came over in their clumsy ships, and Al Hartle and his boys emerged from their bunkers in Cheyenne, and they started the work of finishing off whatever the asteroid left behind. Even given enough survivors, she thought bleakly, it might be impossible to climb back. The post-impact world would not be a blank slate for a new civilization, now that they’d used up ail the most accessible raw materials — ore, coal, oil. And besides the biosphere was already unstable. This might trigger the final plankton collapse, for instance…

It seemed incredible, here in the morning sunshine, on a day like all the other days, stretching back to her first bright memories. But today could be the last day of all. Maybe, she thought, in a couple of centuries, all that will be left of us will be a few relics on the Moon, whatever Paula builds on Titan, a handful of ageing space probes heading out of the System.

She reached the Lincoln Memorial. She climbed the steps, and stared up at Lincoln’s impassive face.

She sat on the step at the top of the Memorial. She was looking east, in the direction of the Atlantic. The sun was well above the horizon now, the sky a clear blue dome. Traffic was beginning to seep into the brightening streets, and its distant noise rose to an oceanic roar, suffusing the landscape.

Sitting here, with the warmth of the sun on her face, the solidity of marble beneath her, she tried to comprehend that by the end of this nondescript day, all this — the labor of centuries — could be lost.

She was hungry, she found.

Benacerraf lay cocooned in her sleeping bag, on an improvised mattress of insulation material and space clothing.

Every time she woke, she had two priorities: to keep warm, and not to open her mouth.

There were several layers of hull metal and insulation — the base of the hab module and the orbiter’s cargo bay — lying between her and the hundred-and-eighty-below slush of Titan. Even so, the miles of ice below her sucked the heat out of her ageing body during the night. She woke up in exactly the same position as when she’d fallen asleep, as if she’d trained herself not to move in her sleep, no matter how stiff she got. She’d found that if she lay still, on the patch of her sleeping bag that her body had warmed up, she could stay relatively comfortable. But if she moved, she would tip over onto a colder place, and the warm air she had gathered around herself would spill out, leaving her shivering.

So she lay, hanging on to the last fragments of the night’s warmth, before she had to face the day. She opened her eyes slowly.

Her reading light was turned off, but enough light leaked around the door to let her make out the lines of the little room: the aluminum mirror on the wall, the lashed-up shelf with her softscreen and her precious paper books, the toothbrush with the broken handle she’d had to tape together…

The realization of where she was pushed its way into her consciousness with all its usual, unwelcome force, and she felt black dread welling inside her.

She sat up. The sleeping bag fell away from her shoulders, and immediately she was shivering, despite the thick Beta-cloth clothing she wore as pajamas.

Still in the dark, she got to her feet. The sleeping bag made a cloth puddle at her feet. She could see her face, dimly, in the scuffed aluminum mirror. She saw an old woman, her face lined and patched with shallow frostbite scars, her hair a dirty cloud, crudely cut, her mouth a bloody mess.

She opened up her tube of lip salve. She smeared it over the lumpy, scabs on her lips. Then she started to work the tip of her tongue gently against the lips, from the inside, until, slowly, they began to part, with little damage to the scabs that had welded together during the night.

Her lips had got damaged during an EVA, when her helmet seal had sprung a leak. She knew she had been lucky; she’d been just a few feet from the airlock. The cold, crowding into her helmet, had been intense. Startled, she had almost fallen, and her lips and chin had come into contact with the cooling glass of her visor. She had pulled her face back, leaving chunks of ripped flesh behind, and a violent burning sensation around her mouth.

She had clamped her eyes shut, and fumbled for Discovery’s airlock.

She got through with no serious frostbite damage. But her lips were a mess. Now, every time she ate, she got a salty mouthful of blood; and every spoonful of soup she lifted to her mouth was streaked with crimson. A couple of times, just after the injury, she’d opened her mouth during the night, or on waking, and had torn the night’s new lip scabs right off.

Cautiously, she stretched her mouth a little wider. The clustered scabs ached, and she could see how some of the deeper crevices had-opened again, so that they glistened bright red.

She thought ahead. She was due to spend most of today in the CELSS farm, cleaning out the nutrient pipes. And later she would have to find some time to work with Rosenberg on the details of the El Dorado EVA—

The door behind her opened quietly.

She turned, startled, and nearly fell; she banged her elbow against the shelf.

There was a figure in the doorway, silhouetted against the brightness of the hab module floods.

Anger welled up in her. This was her quarters, damn it, her one little island of privacy. “Rosenberg, I don’t care what the emergency is. Get out of here.”

“No,” he said; and that single, gruff syllable told her everything she needed to know.

It wasn’t Rosenberg. It was Bill Angel.

And, she realized with sudden horror, today his long decline was going to reach some kind of conclusion.

As the sun climbed and the mist burned off, the colors of Launch Complex 39 emerged more clearly. The snow-white of the toy Saturn was strongly contrasted with the battleship grey of the gantry which enfolded it.

After losing his NASA position to Al Hartle, Hadamard had entered semi-retirement. He couldn’t have gotten another position in Maclachlan’s Administration anyhow, and nor would he have wanted it. He had received a large payoff — that had been written into his contract when he was recruited from industry — and so he was financially comfortable. He had kept on his house in Clear Lake, but he hadn’t spent much time in Houston.

He had no living family, no particular ties. He wasn’t sure what he wanted to do with the rest of his life.

To Hadamard, looking back, his years at NASA had represented a kind of slow crisis for him, like a long breakdown.

He had gone into NASA to dismantle the Agency, much as he had dismantled and reassembled several corporations and Government departments before. By the time he emerged, he had spent years trying to defend it.

He toured the country, visiting relics of the space program: the rusting tracking station at Goldstone, the mothballed Shuttle launch facilities at Vandenburg, the old Saturn construction and test facilities around the country, abandoned or converted by Boeing and Rockwell. He gained a sense of the impermanence of it all; it was as if some insane occupying power had swept across the country, developed these immense facilities at enormous cost, and then abandoned their foothold.

Jake Hadamard, after years running NASA, still didn’t understand the meaning of the space program, nor even his own shifting reaction to it.

Perhaps there was no single meaning, no single valid reaction; perhaps the event was simply too huge for that. But he’d come to suspect that it was only for space — human footprints on the Moon, and on a satellite of Saturn — that his nation would, in the longest of terms, be remembered.

Or even, he thought, his species.

When he’d heard leaked reports of the incoming rock, he’d decided there was only one place he wanted to be.

…There was a spark of light, high in the sky.

Hadamard shielded his eyes with his hands and looked up, searching for the source. It had been hot, yellow, liquid, like rocket light.

It came in at an angle, far to the east, a blindingly white line scrawled across the sky. It was a crack in the Aristotelian dome, Fahy thought, allowing in the monsters.

Asteroid 2002OA had arrived.

She had to turn away, it was so bright.

It was going to be an ocean strike, then. Just as NORAD predicted. A few hundred miles off the coast, she guessed.

The dazzling light had faded now.

So it was true. She thought she’d imagined, with some soft unscientific part of her, until this moment, that it might be just some fantastic hypothesis.

Well, Earth hadn’t suffered a strike like this for millions of years. Human written culture went back maybe five thousand years. There was no institutional memory of such an event as this. No wonder it was hard to comprehend, even to plan for. It should be.

Clouds were boiling, scudding across the sky. The spectacle was playing out in an eerie silence. Even the traffic noises seemed to have stilled.

The atmosphere would have provided no effective shield against the strike; the asteroid must have reached the ocean with no significant loss of mass or velocity: a mountainous mass of rock, moving at orbital speeds, through the delicate atmosphere of Earth. There was essentially an immense cylindrical explosion going on right now, its effects scouring outwards over the surface of the planet.

From orbit, she thought, it would be a hell of a sight: the crater still visible, a glowing red puncture miles across, keeping the sea at bay with its raw heat; an immense column of dust and pulverized rock and vapor rising up above it, its lip extending tens of miles into the atmosphere; the clouds bubbling outwards in ranks, like the concentric rings around a bull’s eye target.

A breeze, warm and heavy, pushed against her face, pressing from the east. There were flecks of moisture on the wind. She licked her lips. Salt: ocean water, scooped up and hurled across hundreds of miles.

Maybe there would be tsunamis. But the geometry was dicey; it depended precisely where the impact was, the topography of the ocean bed. Gradual slopes could reflect the wave energy back to the Atlantic…

There was noise now, at last, a deep bass rumble like remote thunder. The light continued to fade.

The ground shifted, the solid marble of the Memorial’s vast plinth shuddering like a live thing.

For the first time, she was scared. The ground wasn’t supposed to move under you, damn it. It was as if some deep superstitious part of her had woken, an animal peering up at a violent sky in terror.

With her back against the wall of her quarters — the little room wasn’t much bigger than a closet — Benacerraf held up her hands, palms out. “What is it, Bill? What do you need? Are you hungry?”

With sudden, brutal force, he pushed his way into the quarters. She squirmed back against the wall, but his chest and legs pressed against hers, and she could smell the milky sweetness of his breath.

She felt shocked, violated, her last secret place broken open.

He dragged the door shut behind him, and she was immersed in the near-dark once more. She tried not to scream. But her mouth twisted open, and the pain in her lips stabbed at her awareness. She turned her head and pulled her hands back from him, so reluctant was she to touch him.

Again he was still, a huge presence resting against her. He seemed to move in bursts between moments of stillness; it was like the motion of a lizard, rather than anything human.

With an effort she moved her hands forward, in the darkness, until she touched his shoulders. She could feel his chest rise and fall with his breath, raggedly. “Bill, you know you shouldn’t be in here. This is my room. We all need privacy—”

“I’m not a fucking kid.” He reached up and closed his hands over hers. His fingers were powerful, stronger than she would have imagined, and he bent her fingers back, making her cry out. “I’m sick of you talking down at me, Paula.” Now he pushed her hands against her chest so that she was shoved back, painfully, against her shelf.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“I want respect,” he said. “You can understand that, can’t you?” He brought his face closer to hers. “Some things I can still do, eyes or no eyes.”

“Of course you can, Bill. I always—”

He pushed his head forward. He shoved his lips against hers. The muscles of his face were strong, and he easily forced her lips open, and jammed his tongue into her mouth. His lips worked at hers, his teeth scraping hard over the wounds there. Her scabs broke and came loose, the crevice-like wounds opening. She could taste her own blood, the salty tang of saliva and sweat and snot.

The pain in her mouth forced her to cry out again.

He jerked his head back, as if startled, his movements precise and inhuman.

“You’re hurting me, damn it.” Her voice was slurred as she favored her damaged lips. She longed to wipe her mouth, to spit out his dirt.

He began to drag his right hand down over her body, still trapping her fist. His fingers clawed at her breast, through layers of Beta-cloth.

“Bill, for God’s sake.”

“Come on,” he said, his voice a harsh whisper. “Haven’t you heard the news? Don’t you know what’s about to hit Earth?”

“What are you talking about?”

“It’s the end of the fucking world, Paula. There’s just us now, alone here, a billion miles from home. It’s a new world. Adam and Eve.”

You’re crazy, she thought. But if she said it, she sensed, it would make it so, now and forever.

Behind Angel, the door to her quarters was swinging open; the glare of the hab module floods washed over her, outlining his face.

He forced her hand down to his crotch. She tried to keep her fist curled, but he squeezed and shook her hand until she was forced to open her fingers, and he clamped her open hand against himself. She could feel his erection, a hot cylinder pushing against the coarse Beta-cloth.

“Oh, God,” she said. “No, Bill. Not that.”

“Come on. We can do this. Adam and Eve.”

In Seattle, Jackie Benacerraf was woken by a sound of thunder, miles away.

She lay there for a moment, thinking about her mother’s descriptions of storms seen from orbit: Over central Africa, I could see lightning sparking constantly, over cloud systems spanning thousands of miles. The lightning moves through the clouds like a living thing, growing and spreading. Its glow shines from beneath the layer of cloud, and you can see a three-dimensional structure within the cloud, edges and swirls of purple…

Her mother was a long way away.

She sat up, alone in bed.

The lights didn’t come on.

She got out of bed. In pitch darkness, she felt her way to the softscreen coating one wall. Maybe she could get a look at the weather channels, find some kind of satellite view…

The softscreen didn’t work. She pressed at its surface, but it remained inert, a window into darkness.

She started to feel scared.

She went out into the hall. No lights turned themselves on there, either. There were flashes of lightning now, big gaudy bursts that turned the windows into illuminated panels — but no accompanying peals of thunder, just that continual rumble.

There was a smash outside, a clatter of breaking glass.

She ran to the door, opened it. The night was warm; from somewhere, from the east, a hot wind had sprung up, and it pulled at her nightdress and hair. Above, clouds streamed, thick and gaudy; she could see lightning crackle beyond the lowest clouds, in big gaudy sheets, flaring parallel to the ground.

The streetlights were out, she realized; the only light came from the intermittent bursts of lightning, a purplish glow from the streaming clouds.

Even the orange glow of Seattle was invisible.

In her bare feet, she walked down the drive towards the security barrier.

On the corner, two cars had run into each other; their fronts had crumpled, head-on, and steam was rising from a cracked radiator. The drivers had got out, and were slowly walking around the wreckage. The headlamps of the cars cast a pool of light in the middle of the darkness.

She looked around. As far as she could see, there wasn’t a single softscreen working: street signs, house decorations, ad hoardings — all of it was dead, inert, black. It was bizarre, to be without the endless unravelling of colors and shapes all around her: there was an optical stillness she hadn’t experienced in the city for years.

Something, she thought, is very wrong.

And yet, somehow, in some hidden chamber of her heart, she had always known it would come to this.

The boys, she thought. They are the main priority now. Thank God they are both home. Perhaps she should go and wake them.

…But what if the shit really was hitting the fan? How could they prepare? Perhaps they ought to go to the store. Buy canned and packet food, long-life milk. A butane stove. Blankets, torches, thick coats, an axe. Gas for the car.

A gun.

Somewhere, a siren started a mournful wailing. It seemed to puncture her.

They finally did it, she thought. Her plans broke up in her head, and she cried out.

It was over, she realized, with a deep, unwelcome stab of comprehension. The last vestige of control she could exert over her life was gone. She wouldn’t even be able to save her children.

Rain began to fall: heavy, scummy droplets of it, breaking open on the sidewalk. She lifted her face into it; the rain was salty, and stung her eyes. She wondered where Saturn was, in the hidden sky.

Was it worth it, Mother? Was it worth all this, blowing everything apart, just so you could get to walk in the slush up there?

The rain fell harder, soaking her. She hurried up the path to her children.

Dark, thick storm clouds streamed over the sky above Fahy, obscuring the sun. Rain started to fall, big droplets, pelting against the marble surfaces, her clothes and hair, heavy and warm and salty.

She permitted herself a fragment of hope. After all she wasn’t dead yet. The strike itself was over. The world was going to be a piece of shit after this, war or not; but maybe, just maybe, she might live through this to see it.

Maybe NORAD and the rest had miscalculated, she thought. Maybe 2002OA just wasn’t a big enough punch to—

But there was something on the horizon, now: a grey wall, perhaps a bank of cloud.

Oh.

The secondary effects need not concern her any more, she thought.

The wall was water, a bank of it that had to be a mile high. Already it was marching inland. Even from this distance she could see debris embedded in its curving, steel-grey flank: rocks, fragments of ships, pieces of smashed-up buildings. It was the debris that would do the damage, she knew; with its help that wave could scour the ground clean of any sign this capital city had ever existed.

We don’t deserve this, she thought. Although maybe it looks different if you sit in Beijing. And there are those who say something like this, some terrible conclusion, was inevitable, that the huge technological project we’ve been following was bound to end in grief and destruction.

But I know we don’t deserve to have this done to us. Sure, we got things wrong. And we’re guilty of being the only nation in history to have dropped an atomic weapon on an opponent. But didn’t we beat back the Nazis and the Japs? Wasn’t it a good thing that we won the Cold War, and not the other side? Was it really such a terrible thing, to aspire to walk on the moons of Saturn…?

I will, she thought, never see the sun again.

She felt a wrench, a deep sorrow.

The clouds thickened, and moist air buffeted her face, driven ahead of that horizon-spanning piston of water.

He looked oddly beautiful, she thought with a rogue part of her mind: his face blank and intent, ruined eyes closed, that WASP hair shining in the hab module floods. And he was so strong…

He pulled at the neck of her T-shirt, trying to rip it. The coarse hem burned into her neck. The tough fabric wouldn’t rip, so he pushed his hand up inside her clothing instead. He reached her breast and grabbed it, squeezing hard. Then he shoved his hand downwards over her belly, trying to get into her pants.

He pushed his face forward and began to gnaw at her lips once more.

Her left hand was free.

She grabbed the door frame and yanked backwards, as hard as she could.

On Earth, perhaps she couldn’t have budged Angel. But here they were in one-seventh gravity. Locked together, they began to tip over.

Angel released the hand he’d held over his penis, and reached behind to brace his fall. She tried to keep from falling with him; she grabbed at the doorway. But his other hand was stuck inside her clothing; he dragged her down on top of him, helpless.

He landed heavily on his arm, and there was a snap, like the breaking of a thin branch. Angel screamed. He scrabbled against the floor, like a turned-over beetle, his ruined eyes turning back and forth.

She rolled away from him. It was the first moment since he’d bust into her quarters that she hadn’t been in physical contact with him. He was stirring. Clutching his damaged arm against his chest, he was turning over, getting to his knees.

She tried to stand up, but she felt weak and off-balance. She crawled away, towards the galley.

He reached out and grabbed her ankle. The effort cost him the support of his good arm, and she could see him fall flat on his chest. But even so he was able to drag her back towards him.

She was rolled onto her back. For a moment she lay with her feet mere inches from his face. With one slam of her heel in his face, she thought, this could be over. She lifted up her free foot, trying to make herself do it.

Angel flopped towards her, so that his mass trapped her legs, his bad arm pinned between them. He didn’t seem to notice the pain now. With his good hand he reached up and grabbed at the waist of her pants, trying to haul them off her.

Suddenly, Rosenberg stood over them. He held one of their improvised snow shovels, with its sharp blade of Apollo hull section. Holding the handle with two hands, he raised the blade over his head.

His bespectacled face was blank, thoughtful, as if he was considering some abstract problem.

“Rosenberg! Don’t… we have to…”

He brought the blade swinging down through the air, as if he was chopping wood. The blade hit Angel’s neck, with a moist, soft noise, like slicing cabbage.

Blood splashed. Angel stiffened, throwing his head back.

Then he slumped forward against her, his hand still locked in her waist band. The blade seemed to be stuck in his neck.

Rosenberg bent and grabbed Angel’s long hair. He hauled, and just peeled Angel away from her. She saw blood — her blood? — dribbling from Angel’s mouth.

Rosenberg dumped Angel aside. The blade came free of Angel’s neck now, and tumbled to the floor with a clatter.

Benacerraf sat up. The neck of her T-shirt was stretched, but not torn. There was a smear over the front, of blood and saliva and snot. Angel had managed to pull her shorts down as far as her hips, and her bony pelvis was exposed, a dark rim of pubic hair. She tugged at a flap of cloth, covering her crotch.

“He’s dead,” Rosenberg said evenly.

“I think he broke his arm, when I fell on him.”

Rosenberg shrugged. “Brittle bones. He had the skeleton of an old man. To hell with him.”

“Are you all right, Rosenberg?”

He studied her, as if examining a specimen of gumbo. “I don’t know. I’ve come a long way from JPL.”

“Yeah.”

She shuddered, and pulled her arms around her torso.

Hadamard was on his belly, on the ground. Immense chunks of debris, rusted and torn, clattered down around him.

An earthquake, in Florida.

His arms were splayed out, over the ground. His face was pressed into the sweet grass. The grass, he noticed, was a rich green, and still moist from the dew of the morning, and where his cheeks and chin had crushed the blades, there was a warm chlorophyll smell.

There was blood on the grass, though, a deep crimson, and a sharp stab of pain in his mouth. He probed gingerly with his tongue. The front of his mouth was a mess; it felt as if his lower teeth had been smashed, and his lip felt ripped open, as if his teeth had jammed themselves through the flesh.

He had difficulty moving his jaw. Perhaps it was broken.

Now he pulled his hands towards him, and he felt the moist grass rustling beneath his palms. With his hands beneath his shoulders, he pushed, as if attempting a press-up.

He couldn’t lift his chest off the ground. And when he tried, a pain in his legs and knees, extraordinary in its intensity, came flooding over him.

He slumped back to the ground. As he did so, he felt something grind inside his chest, a new source of astounding pain.

Probably he was trapped under debris from the press stand. Maybe his legs were broken too. And it felt as if there was a bust rib or two in there…

His orderly catalogue broke down, as his thinking was overwhelmed by a new wave of agony.

He was thirsty.

He managed to turn his head to look across at the VAB. The big cube of a building had cracked, from the lip of one of the huge Saturn-V-size doorways all the way to the roof. Gigantic blocks and sheets of concrete were falling away from the walls of the building, exposing fresh, unweathered material beneath, which gleamed briefly in what was left of the sunlight; for a moment Hadamard had a brief vision of how this magnificent folly must have looked in the 1960s, when it was fresh and new and unweathered, the embodiment of a gigantic technocratic dream.

But then the cracks widened, and the interior of the structure, its skeletal framework within, was exposed.

At the foot of the crumbling building he saw a splash of red metal, splayed out beneath a fifty-feet slab of concrete. It was his car, crushed like a bug.

He twisted his neck and looked across the Banana River.

It looked as if 39-B had gone altogether. 39-A was tilted at a crazy angle. Next to that defiant, rusting skeleton, the Saturn mockup had been snapped in two. The first stage was still standing, like a stump of broken bone, but the upper stages and the fake Apollo spacecraft lay, indistinctly visible, scattered on the ground at the foot of the gantry.

No more Moon flights for a while, he thought.

At least the Moon rocks ought to be safe, those unopened samples in their vaults in JSC. Maybe archaeologists of the future would find that huge, twenty-billion-dollar cache, the unopened cores and sealed boxes, and wonder how so much of this alien rock had found its way to the planet Earth.

The water in the Banana River was draining, as if a plug had been drawn.

The shocks returned.

The overgrown meadow in front of him lifted up. He could actually see the pressure wave traversing the surface of the ground, as if the Earth itself had been shocked into some new fluid form.

There was an immense groan, a rumble deeper than the roar of any rocket engine.

And then the ground lifted up beneath him. He was thrown into the air, his limbs dangling like a doll’s. The pain in his legs was excruciating.

But the experience was oddly exhilarating, as if he were a child, thrown up by his father, with safe, strong arms waiting to catch him.

He caught a last, wheeling glimpse of Florida sunlight.

She showered, scrubbing herself in as much hot water as Discovery could feed her. She was bruised, on her breast and her stomach, where Angel had grabbed at her. Her neck was burned from the Beta-cloth. Her lips were a mess, and she knew she would have to ask Rosenberg to treat them.

But not today. She couldn’t stand the thought of being touched again. Not today.

When she was done she dumped her soiled clothes outside her quarters. She got back in and closed the door. She straightened out her sleeping bag, which had been kicked around during the struggle.

She got inside, and wrapped her arms around herself, trying to stop shivering, unable to sleep.

Outside she could hear Rosenberg moving around the hab module, hauling at heavy loads.

When she got too thirsty, she dressed, and pushed her way out of her quarters.

Her little pile of clothes had gone. And so had Angel’s body. The place looked clean, as if nothing had happened.

She went to the galley and dug out the coffee. There were only a few ounces of freeze-dried grains left, and they were hoarding them for rainy days. But, she thought, her days weren’t going to come much rainier than this.

She drank the coffee, thick and black. The hot liquid burned at her broken lips, but the pain was somehow welcome, cleansing. The Titan water in the tanks was as fresh as run-off from a Colorado mountain.

Rosenberg came in from the airlock.

“I saved you some coffee,” she said.

His smile was thin. “Thanks.”

“Where is he?”

“Buried in the gumbo. But he ain’t going to stay there.”

“You’re going to feed him to the water oxidizer.”

“Damn right. Now he’s frozen out there, he will be easier to, uh, dismantle. I’m no wet butcher, Paula.”

“My God,” she said. “Sometimes I think you’re as crazy as he is.”

“Was.”

“Won’t it give you any qualms, to feed off life support loops containing the corpse of a human?”

“Why should it? We’ve been eating each other’s waste products for two billion miles anyhow. Look, if it bothers you, I’ll just pass him through the SCWO and vent the products, discard the residue.”

“The main thing is to get him burned, right?”

“Do you object?”

She pictured Bill Angel coming at her, and shuddered. “It was my fault,” she said slowly. “I handled him wrong, from the beginning.”

“What the hell could you have done?”

“He seemed so competent,” she said.

“This helps us out with our life support equations. But the logic of our situation hasn’t changed, Paula. In fact—”

“What?”

“We had news from home.” He looked at her, searching her face. “They raised the stakes on us again, Paula. It’s even more important we survive.”

She felt chill. Bill had said something… She’d thought he was raving. “What do you mean?”

He smiled. “I ought to fix up that lip of yours,” he said.

“Later, Rosenberg.”

“Sure… You know, there’s always work to be done in the farm.”

The farm. That was what she was supposed to be doing today.

The thought of entering the tight walls of the old Apollo, with the racks of green, growing things under their sunlight lamps, was suddenly powerfully appealing to her.

“Yes,” she said. “The farm.” She sipped the coffee from Earth, trying to make it last.

Rosenberg went to the comms panel, and tried to find a signal from Houston.