Rosenberg seemed to snap.
She’d never seen him so angry. He came up and loomed over her, screaming at her. “This is precisely the reason we came to Titan in the first place. We have to be able to do more than sit around in here recycling Bill’s piss and waiting to die. Paula, either you come out with me now, or I go out there myself. Right now.” There were flecks of spittle on his lip, and behind his glasses his red-rimmed eyes were staring.
She closed her eyes, and wished she was in her wardroom.
She was sick of juggling them, these two assholes, both as difficult as each other in their ways, both demanding that she soak it all up, run their lives for them.
…The news from Earth, sent up to them in digital packets by the last DSN dish at Goldstone, was there. More ecological decay, more flashpoint wars over crop failures and water shortages, more floods of refugees washing across the southern continents, more sabre-rattling between the Chinese and Maclachlan’s government. In a way, the Chinese issue scared her most. It was like the Cold War all over again. Except that she sensed those old bastards in Beijing meant it, in a way the Kremlin never had.
Well, maybe they could actually do some good up here. Maybe news of life outside Earth might actually lift some hearts, down on the bleeding ground. As Rosenberg said, it was why they’d come here, after all.
“You win, Rosenberg. We’ll go.”
He backed off, trembling.
“But,” she said evenly, “it had better be worth it.”
Angel, blind face turning this way and that, cackled as he rocked.
They stepped outside the orbiter, emerging into the pitch dark of a Titan night.
Benacerraf insisted the two of them rope themselves together.
Rosenberg laughed at her. “For Christ’s sake, Paula. The tholin out west is as flat as a pancake for miles. What are you expecting to happen?”
She confronted him. “I don’t know. I’ve only taken a walk over a methane vent once before, and last time I didn’t know I was doing it. If we have to be out here at all, we take precautions. Take the damn rope, Rosenberg.”
He made noises of disgust. But he knotted the rope around his waist.
They set off into the deeper dark, north-westwards, preceded by circles of lamplight. Benacerraf led the way, trying to retrace her steps to the methane vent. The gumbo glistened, purple and black, in the white light of the lamps; it reminded Benacerraf of an open wound.
Somehow, Benacerraf thought, it was harder to walk into the dark, with the gumbo sucking at her snowshoes, and only unmarked desolation ahead of her, beyond the circles of lamp light. Her imagination seemed to be populating the empty darkness with vague demons, and she felt a gathering dread at the thought of proceeding further.
Perhaps, she thought with a stab of unwelcome sympathy, Bill Angel feels like this all the time: his isolation on this dead alien world compounded by being lost in the dark.
After a couple of miles, she slowed. “It was about here.”
Rosenberg cast about with his lamp. “The surface looks normal to me.” He started to unknot the rope at his waist. “We ought to separate,” he said. “We’ll halve the time it takes if we work independently. Now, if I take the—”
“Keep the rope on, Rosenberg.”
“Paula, that’s just not logical. It’s so inefficient.”
“Keep the rope on, or we go back right now. I mean it, Rosenberg. Ammonia life or no ammonia life.”
He groused like a kid. “Shit, Paula.” But he knotted the rope up again.
They began to search, working in widening circles around their starting position, the rope stretched to its maximum extent, their lamps throwing elliptical patches across the glistening, sticky gumbo.
It was more difficult than Benacerraf had expected; the colors of the gumbo were different in white, Earth-like lamplight, and the color changes she’d observed before were obscured. Rosenberg took to using his infra-red vision. The resolution was poorer than with the naked eye, but perhaps he could detect the temperature changes associated with the methane vent.
After a few minutes, Benacerraf found what looked like a series of small, circular craters, dug into the gumbo at her feet. When she looked more closely, she found the lamplight had deceived her, making her reverse the image in her mind’s eye; the “craters” were actually bubbles, pushing slowly up through the gumbo.
“Rosenberg,” she breathed. “I think I have it.”
He came over as fast as the gumbo would permit. He stood over the bubbling patch. “My God,” he said. “You’re right, Paula. We did it. What a discovery.”
He unloaded his sampling gear from the pockets of his EMU. He took scrapings of the gumbo, and of the atmosphere within and above the methane bubbles. He assembled a hollow tube from sections, to take a core sample. He hoped that the lower levels of the core would contain materials soaked in liquid ammonia.
Benacerraf worked patiently at the core, twisting the improvised handle at the top, coaxing the core into the ground. It was difficult even to hold the handle against the stiffness of her thick gloves. She could feel the unevenness of her gloves’ heating elements rubbing against her palm, and soon she thought her fingertips, where they were scraping against the material of her gloves, were starring to bleed.
k took as much effort to drag the core out of the clinging ground as to insert it. When it was free, Rosenberg started to dismantle the core sections.
A thunderous roar, deep bass, sounded through Benacerraf’s helmet. Benacerraf could feel deep vibrations, as though the source of the noise was right beneath her feet.
Rosenberg said, “I think—”
There was a boom, like a sonic shock.
A few yards to Rosenberg’s right, a grey cloud was erupting. She turned that way to focus her lamp light. The cloud was droplets of gumbo, thrown up from the ground, subsiding slowly back to the surface.
The ground had collapsed beneath the cloud, forming a roughly circular crater maybe six feet across. Benacerraf thought she could make out a gush of gas — methane, she guessed — pulsing out of the hole.
“Holy shit,” Benacerraf breathed.
“The whole area is unstable,” Rosenberg said quickly. He was still working on the core. “We’re on some kind of crust over big methane bubbles. The methane venting might become explosive.”
Another shudder beneath Benacerraf’s feet. The ground shook again, and again. Another hole, bigger than the first, opened up to her right.
“Let’s go, Rosenberg.”
He was bending to the surface, scooping up the sections of the core sample. “I just need to collect this.”
“Leave it, for Christ’s sake.”
More crumps and bangs; the ground shuddered again. Rosenberg was still fussing with his samples.
“Rosenberg! Move!” She tugged at the rope, yelling at him.
He straightened up, clutching one core sample section which he shoved in a pocket of his EMU.
They started to make their way back out of the vent area, stepping clumsily, casting their lamp light around. They followed their footsteps back out towards Tartarus; the footsteps showed up as a trail of shallow, infilling gumbo craters.
A gush of methane erupted from the ice, just to Benacerraf’s left. She ducked. The noise was so all-engulfing it felt as if the sound was passing both underfoot and overhead.
And then a crater, a distorted circle ten feet across and steaming with methane vapor, opened up between Benacerraf and Rosenberg. There seemed no limit to the depth of the craters in their lamplight, as if the exposed pits reached to the heart of the world.
There was a feeling of hollowness beneath her; she thought she could hear echoes of the imploding ice and gumbo being returned from some huge chamber beneath her. She had the vertiginous feeling that she was crossing some fragile bridge, over a chasm.