Titan (45 page)

“Let us keep a dish,” Hadamard said suddenly.

Hartle looked at him. “Huh?”

“A deep space dish. Let us keep Goldstone open, at least. That way, at least maybe we’ll be able to listen to
Discovery.
Better PR, Al.”

Hartle’s eyes narrowed. “What the hell,” he said. “Keep the fucking dish; what can that cost?”

Hadamard nodded, avoiding Fahy’s eyes.

He’d won a small victory, Fahy saw, extracting such a relatively inexpensive concession in this, Hartle’s moment of triumph. Maybe this was his main objective for the meeting, in fact. Maybe he brought me in here as a kind of diversion, to soak up Hartle’s fire.

I should be so political, she thought.

But I’m not.

She asked, “Who is going to tell the astronauts? You, General? The President? Who will tell their families?”

Hartle grinned easily and stood up. “I’ll leave that to old Jake here; he’s still the man holding the ball until next month. And you, Miss Fahy, will start working on delivery systems for those biobomb options we outlined.”

“I quit,” she said impulsively “You’ll have my resignation on your desk the day you walk in here.”

He walked over to her; he stood before her threateningly, a squat pillar of silver hair and grizzled skin and tough, aged muscle. “And you’ll have it back up your ass, corners first, a day after that. This is a time of national crisis, Miss Fahy; quitting is not an option. For any of us.”

He turned and left. Deeke rolled up his softscreen, nodded to Hadamard, and followed.

Hadamard, staring at the floor, seemed to have nothing to say. Framed in the window behind him, a slab of orange Washington sky was brightening to a washed-out glare.

O
n
Discovery’
s flight deck,
Benacerraf sat strapped into the left-hand commander’s seat. She was wearing her usual grubby Beta-cloth T-shirt and shorts. The flight deck was homey, like a little den, glowing with the fluorescent glareshield lights, and the multicolored light of the instruments panels. Benacerraf always felt comfortable in here: at home, in the environment in which she’d spent so many hours training and flying. Anyhow, the flight deck, with its big windows, made a pleasing change from the shut-in squalor that the hab module had become, and the stinking cabin of the centrifuge.

Especially today, she thought. Because today, for the first time in nearly two years, Earthlight was streaming into
Discovery.

Thirty minutes from closest approach, Earth was a fat ball that looked the size of a dinner-plate held at arm’s length.

From Benacerraf’s point of view, behind the big picture windows on
Discovery
’s flight deck, the planet was a gibbous disc, close to full, suspended over the roof of the cabin. The orbiter would fly past Earth with her belly away from the planet, and her payload bay turned to Earth, to give the instruments there a good vantage.

Discovery
was barreling in at around twelve miles per second—fast enough to cross the continental United States in five minutes, fast enough to traverse the diameter of Earth itself in eleven minutes.

The hemisphere turned to the sun was coated with land: it was noon somewhere over central Asia, and much of the Pacific must be in darkness. She could see the mountain-fringed plateaux broadening out from Turkey, through Iran and Afghanistan, to the great Tibetan plateau. The plateau was cut off from the rest of India by the still higher Himalayas. To the south and east of this plateau were the great river valleys of Asia, crammed with humanity. Masses of stratus clouds were piled up behind the mountains; she could see how the mountains, protruding through the vapor layer, were causing disturbances in the clouds, like waves, along a front a thousand miles long.

Benacerraf—parochial to the last—felt a stab of regret she wasn’t going to get to see more of the continental U.S.

There were few signs of human life, even from here.

She knew that the old Apollo astronauts had been struck by the beauty and fragility of Earth from space. It hadn’t hit Benacerraf like that at all. At first glance Earth was a world of ocean, desert and a little ice, half-covered by cloud. The areas colonized by humans seemed tiny, dwarfed, little rectangles of cultivated ground clinging to the coasts, or the banks of rivers, or timidly at the feet of mountains. Almost all of the Earth was empty, too hostile for man; humans clung in little clusters to the fringes of continents, like some feeble lichen.

To Benacerraf, the view from space showed her not so much the delicacy of Earth, but the tenuous grasp of humanity, even on this single planet, even after four billion years of life’s adaptation, down there at the bottom of that murky gravity well.

Humans were restricted to a shell around the surface of Earth, no thicker than an hour’s car ride. In the depths of interplanetary space, where Earth and Moon were reduced to faint specks, man had left no mark but a handful of aging spacecraft, a thin hiss of radio static … and
Discovery.

The Universe was huge, empty, dead. It knew nothing of mankind and all its works. Benacerraf had traveled beyond Venus; she had seen that for herself. Here she was scooting over the surface of Earth itself, and she still thought so.

At such times, the thought of life aspiring to anything but to cling to the surface of that big ball of rock down there seemed absurd.

She was alone up here, on the flight deck. She didn’t even know where the others were right now.

It made you think, if the four of them couldn’t stand each other enough to be together even for the few hours of this flyby of the home world.

But she was going to stay up here. It was, after all, one hell of a view. And she had a duty to perform.

Discovery
was passing behind the planet, crossing over its night side, so from Benacerraf’s point of view the fat gibbous disc began to narrow, soon approaching a crescent.

The crescent thinned rapidly as it grew, as if the light were bleeding from its tapering horns. Soon it was so huge that Benacerraf had to crane her neck to see its full extent.

And then, with a flare of gold and red, the sun passed beyond the horizon.

Discovery,
flying over oceans, plunged into Earth’s huge shadow. Now, the spacecraft inhabited a new landscape, which revealed itself to Benacerraf as her eyes dark-adapted.

Over the night hemisphere of Earth, a huge aurora glowed. It was a curtain of green light that appeared to extend from the fleeing spacecraft all the way to Earth’s horizon, at the pole. Beneath, the aurora blended in with the airglow, the luminous gas layer high in the atmosphere excited by the sun’s radiation. And Benacerraf could see noctilucent clouds, very high decks illuminated by the airglow, like the surface of a thin, milky sea. Above the aurora, very faint, she could see streamers, very thin striations which seemed to extend down from much higher altitudes, spokes aligned with the Earth’s magnetic field.

The aurora’s curtains and folds seemed to be on the same level as
Discovery
—the orbiter was near its closest approach now, just a couple of hundred miles above the planet—and Benacerraf had a rare sense of motion, of speed, of sailing through some invisible sea, populated by these bergs of cool light.

It was the most beautiful thing Benacerraf had ever seen. And a hell of a relief from the bleak emptiness of interplanetary space, where it never felt like she was going anywhere. Damn, damn. How could I abandon all this?

Discovery
was revisiting Earth for its final gravity assist before Jupiter; Earth was, in fact, the most massive object between the sun and Jupiter.

By passing so close to Earth—coming within a couple of hundred miles of its surface—
Discovery
had become briefly coupled to Earth, like, Benacerraf thought, a child grabbing hold of a merry-go-round propelled by the strong arms of its father. When
Discovery
flew on, it would have picked up energy from the encounter—the equivalent of thousands of pounds of additional fuel—and Earth’s store of energy would be reduced; forever after the planet would circle the sun a little slower.

Benacerraf remembered a Public Affairs Officer trying to explain this at a JSC briefing, a couple of months before the launch. A reporter asked if the resulting slowdown in the Earth’s orbit around the sun would do harm to the environment On the podium, there were the usual shaking of heads and rolling of eyes. Then Bill Angel had said, mockingly, that NASA would just have to launch another spacecraft and make it fly by Earth on the opposite side…

General laughter.

It had left a sour taste in Benacerraf’s mouth. That reporter had been entitled to a better answer than that. There was too much bullshitting of the ignorant, when it came to science and engineering, she thought. You only had to look at the history of the civil nuclear power program to see that engineers didn’t deserve any kind of implicit trust, that they had a duty to answer as fully as possible every question and concern from the public, however dumb it might seem.

And anyhow, Angel’s answer had been wrong tactically; because after that the questioning had gotten very hostile, for instance on what contingency plans NASA had to shoot
Discovery
down if something went wrong—if the ship came barreling in towards a collision with Earth, with the payload bay full of uranium…

And maybe all that arrogance had contributed, in the end, to the decision to dump Benacerraf and her crew: to cut off the retrieval program, even to close down the resupply missions.

Benacerraf and the others had half-expected such a sentence from the beginning, she suspected, even as they’d formulated the unlikely mission profile, over Chinese food in her house at Clear Lake. And, oddly, it hadn’t seemed so hard to take when the news first came in, as they sailed around the sun at the boiling heart of the Solar System.

But now, so close to Earth, it was much more difficult. To sail over that blue-glowing landscape, so close, to be within a couple of thousand miles of Jackie and the kids—and not be able to reach them—was pretty much unbearable.

For this closeness was an illusion. She was separated from Earth now by intangible barriers of energy and velocity, as impenetrable as the huge distances of the Solar System. There was no way
Discovery
could shed all its hard-won kinetic energy, and allow them to sail safely home.

Benacerraf was not going home, ever again. Her only destination now was Titan, a cold dark hole, out on the chilly rim of the System.

Suddenly, the sunrise was approaching, far ahead, at the rim of the roof which the Pacific hemisphere had become.

A blue streak, deep and beautiful, spread around Earth’s huge curve. Then a golden brown began to seep into the light. Abruptly the gold flooded out the blue, becoming as bright as rocket light, and spreading around the horizon; a fingernail arc of the sun appeared at the horizon, and the shadows of clouds fled across the ocean towards Benacerraf.

Bright white light flooded the cabin, as the sun hauled itself over the limb of Earth.

It was, Benacerraf realized, almost certainly the last Earth sunrise she would ever witness.

… There was a sharp tap, directly in front of her, making her jump.

Holy shit, she thought. It had sounded for all the world like a fingernail on the window.

She released her restraints and pushed herself out of her chair, head first towards the window before her.

She could see a tiny crater there, maybe a sixteenth of an inch in diameter. It picked up the flat sunlight coming over the ocean, and gleamed like a raindrop on the outside of the glass.

She knew she was in no danger. The exterior window was a half-inch thick, and two further panes lay behind that; there was a total of two inches of glass between her and the vacuum.

Maybe this little dink had been caused by something natural, a micrometeorite. Maybe. On the other hand,
Discovery
was flying right through the altitude where the maximum density of man-made debris had accumulated: bits of broken-up satellites, droplets of frozen fuel, nuts and bolts. She was willing to bet that if she dug down into that little pit, she’d find a flake of some cheap Chinese paint, or a droplet of frozen urine from the
Mir.

A minute after closest approach, Earth had receded by seventy miles, and Benacerraf could see the planet falling away; a couple of minutes after that and
Discovery
had risen more than a thousand miles above the surface. As Earth closed over its own spherical belly of silvery ocean, Benacerraf felt a stab of loneliness, of loss.

Earth receded, now, as dramatically as if she was rising in some kind of high speed lift. The huge, delicately edged crescent of blue and white opened out rapidly, the sky-bright sunlit side expanding into the darkness. She could see how rapidly she was moving; the clouds piled up over the equator seemed to flow steadily into her view as
Discovery
flew on. After perhaps fifteen minutes the orbiter had receded to about a full Earth diameter, and suddenly she could see the half-shadowed disc of Earth, contained in her window, hanging over the payload bay like some unlikely Moon…