Titan

28 May 2096: Free fall

The shaking slowed and then stopped altogether. Gaeta opened his eyes. The bath of fiery gases that surrounded the aeroshell had dimmed considerably. He felt weight, felt the shell swaying to and fro as it dropped like a falling leaf through the thick, murky cloud layer of Titan’s atmosphere.

No stars to be seen. He thought about activating the infrared viewing system but that would mean letting go of the hand cleats to press buttons on the keypad built into the wrist of his suit. He had no intention of releasing his grip on the cleats. Not yet, he told himself. Ride this sucker down as far as she’ll go. You’ll have plenty of time for heroics later on.

“ … past plasma sheath blackout,” he heard Fritz’s voice saying, sounding slightly annoyed. “Can you hear me?”

“I hear you,” Gaeta replied, knowing that his transmission was being relayed off one of the minisatellites Urbain had placed in orbit around Titan, then back to the habitat in Saturn orbit. It took damned near twelve seconds for signals to make the round trip.

“You are through the blackout,” Fritz said needlessly. Gaeta thought he sounded just the slightest bit relieved.

“Yeah. I’m floating down through the lower layers of the atmosphere now. The sky’s clouded over completely but there’s enough light down here to see okay.”

Then he waited twelve seconds for Fritz’s response to reach him. “Once the aeroshell destructs you can activate your infrared receptors.”

“Yeah. Right.”

Glancing at the timeline display splashed on the left side of his helmet visor, Gaeta saw that the shell was set to break up in another three and a half minutes. Two hundred and ten seconds. Time enough for housekeeping chores.

“Check all your internal systems,” Fritz commanded.

“Copy systems check.”

Gingerly, Gaeta snapped the grippers at the end of his right arm onto the x-frame’s cleat and wriggled his arm out of the suit’s sleeve. Then he tapped on the keyboard inside the suit’s chest, going through its life-support systems first. The displays flashed on his visor: air supply, pumps, heaters, water circulation, all in the green. He went on to check the suit’s servomotors, the structural integrity of its outer shell, then the sensor systems. All within nominal limits.

Fritz sounded almost pleased. “Our displays show the suit’s systems in the green.”

“All green,” Gaeta agreed.

Again the delay imposed by distance. Then, “Aeroshell self-destruct in forty-three seconds.”

“Forty-three, copy,” Gaeta said, keeping his voice flat, calm. There’ll be plenty of time for screaming when this bathtub breaks apart, he said to himself.

Cardenas sat alone in her nanolab, perched on a stool beside the workbench. Tavalera was nowhere in sight. The lab was empty and silent.

Her mind was churning. Those things in Saturn’s rings can’t be nanomachines, she repeated to herself for the hundredth time. They can’t be! That would mean they were built by intelligent engineers or scientists. We’re the only intelligent species in the solar system, and we didn’t put them in the rings. Then who did?

The aliens who built that artifact in the Asteroid Belt? she asked herself. But that’s just an unsubstantiated rumor. There hasn’t been a peep in the news about that for years.

With a shake of her head, she looked up at the digital clock on the wall, then commanded her computer, “Display Titan mission timeline, please.”

The smart wall immediately showed a chart with a small red dot pulsating along its horizontal axis. Manny’s in Titan’s atmosphere now, she saw. He’ll be ditching his heat shield in half a minute.

“Call—” She hesitated. I shouldn’t bother Fritz and his team, she told herself. If anything goes wrong, if there’s any trouble, he’ll call me. Sooner or enough.

I could just call and ask if everything’s going all right, she thought. Fritz would be annoyed, but what do I care?

You mustn’t interrupt him in the middle of the mission, her conscience warned her. Don’t distract him. He’s Manny’s lifeline—don’t do anything to endanger that link.

I could go to the mission control room, she said silently. I could just stand there by the door and be as quiet as a mouse. Quieter. I wouldn’t disturb Fritz or any of his people. They wouldn’t even know I was there.

And what good would that do? her conscience demanded. You can’t help Manny. If anything went wrong, there’s not a damned thing you could do about it.

I could be there. I could see what’s happening. I wouldn’t have to sit here waiting, not knowing.

It wouldn’t do any good. You’d just be in their way.

Cardenas knew it was true. Still … Manny’s carrying the package of nanos. If there’s any problem with them I could be right there at the control center to tell them how to handle it.

Her conscience replied, A rationalization, at best. A pretty lame excuse, actually.

But she got off the stool and started for the airlock door of the nanolab, thinking, a lame excuse is better than none.

At the door she hesitated. That’s it! she thought. That’s the way to tell if they’re machines or not.

“Phone,” she called out. “Get Dr. Negroponte.”

The mission timeline chart disappeared from the wall screen, replaced by Negroponte’s face. The biologist looked surprised.

“Kris?I was about to call you.”

“I just hit on a way to tell if your bugs are nanomachines or not.”

“Yes?”

“Watch them reproduce,” said Cardenas. “If they’re biological they’ll fission or mate, right? If they’re nanos they’ll construct new copies of themselves out of the atoms in the ice.”

Negroponte nodded solemnly. “You’d better come over here again, Kris. You’ll want to see this firsthand.”

As Tavalera walked Holly down the street from the cafeteria back to her apartment she was still chattering with enthusiasm.

“I’m gonna talk to Staveneger and see what he thinks about capturing comets. He’s a blistering smart corker, maybe the smartest guy in the whole twirling solar system.”

“Hey,” Tavalera protested, “it was my idea, remember?”

“Yes, Raoul, I know. You’re smart, too. I love you for your brain as well as your body.”

He felt his cheeks go warm.

“I’ve gotta call my sister, too. Panch’ll go crazy over this. She’s been lookin’ for something to do. Well now she can become a comet hunter.”

They had reached the front steps of Holly’s apartment building.

“I’ve got to get back to the nanolab,” Tavalera said, reluctant to leave her.

“Right. Sure,” Holly said absently. She pecked him on the cheek, then went bouncing up the steps and disappeared into the apartment building.

Yeah, she loves me, Tavalera thought. Like a pet dog. He walked away, morose and already lonely.

Gaeta could hear wind whistling past, even inside the thickly insulated helmet of his excursion suit.

“Breakup in five seconds,” Fritz’s voice warned. “Four …”

Even though he expected it, the sound of the explosive cords going off made Gaeta’s insides jump. The shell split apart beneath him, jerking him sideways as he hung on to the x-frame in which his booted feet and gloved hands were clamped. He got a glimpse of the shattered pieces of the aeroshell tumbling away from him, burning as they were designed to do, becoming bright fireballs streaking through the cloud-covered air.

“Can’t see the ground,” he said as he spun slowly, his stomach going queasy.

“Stabilize your spin,” Fritz replied, icy calm.

Gaeta let go of the frame with his right hand and slithered his arm back inside the suit, groping for the control studs built in its interior. He felt, rather than saw, tiny maneuvering thrusters squirt several small bursts. The spinning slowed, then stopped. All he felt now was a falling sensation.

“Looks pretty dark down there,” he reported. Gaeta could see a rough, broken expanse of ground kilometers below. It looked hard, uninviting.

“Escape pod separation in one minute,” Fritz said.

“One minute, copy.”

It sounded awfully dramatic to call it an escape pod, Gaeta thought, but Fritz insisted on using the term and Berkowitz loved it. The more dramatic the better, Gaeta said to himself as he dropped in free fall, arms and legs outstretched, toward the dim and murky surface of Titan. As if what I’m doing isn’t dramatic enough, he thought: they’ve got to use colorful language for the audience. Well, I hope they’re enjoying the show. Too bad VR can’t duplicate this falling sensation for them. He almost laughed aloud. Couple of million VR customers upchucking in their living rooms, inside their virtual reality helmets. That would be really funny.

“Five seconds to separation,” Fritz called.

Gaeta mentally counted with him. Fritz was adjusting for the communications lag between them, he knew. Exactly as Fritz said, “Zero,” the explosive bolts holding the return pod to his x-frame went off with a flash of light and a pitifully small pop. A huge parasail canopy unfurled above the pod and seemed to fly away from Gaeta. He knew that one of the engineers working under Fritz had the responsibility for remotely guiding the pod to a landing as close to Urbain’s stranded rover as humanly possible.

Me, Gaeta told himself, all I’ve got to do is land right on top of the monster.