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.