“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.