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.