Rosenberg said, “Correct. But wherever we land it’s going to look superficially the same. The atmosphere is so thick that the temperature scarcely varies, from pole to pole. What we need to find — for the science, and so we can supply our own needs — is an interface between geologic units. An area where several different types of terrain come together.”

“You have a suggestion?”

“Yeah.” He stabbed a finger at the map, near the center, close to the “coastline” of the continent, Cronos. “There’s a mountain range here, sprawling right across the equator. And a few degrees to the south of the equator, just here, is the highest mountain on Titan. The Survey called it Mount Othrys.”

Mott asked, “More mythology?”

“Yeah…”

Benacerraf said, “Why do we need to be near a mountain?”

“I told you everything is covered in slush, in tholins. We’re going to need water ice, however. But there is rain. Ethane and methane rain,” he said. The rain evaporates before it reaches ground level. But it should wash the tholins off the elevated ground. So the peak of Othrys will be exposed bedrock.”

“Bedrock,” Mott said, not following.

“Think Titan,” Rosenberg said.

“Oh. I get it. Exposed water ice.”

“All right,” Benacerraf said. “So we come down somewhere near this mountain.” Just to the north of the mountain, she saw, there was a large crater, maybe twenty miles wide, filled with a cashew-nut shaped lake. “How about here?”

Mott studied the map. “The crater has no name.”

Rosenberg shrugged. “The USGS didn’t name anything much below a hundred miles across…”

“Then we’ll have to,” Benacerraf said decisively. “Niki, you got any suggestions? This is going to be home, after all.”

Mott smiled. “A dingy stretch of fluid, overlaid by twenty-four-hour smog, and stinking of petrochemicals? Paula, as you say, it’s just like Houston. We’ll call it Clear Lake.”

“Clear Lake it is.”

They fell silent, then, and looked at each other, here in the muggy Californian warmth, the bright light of the meeting room.

Clear Lake.

Benacerraf thought, What the hell are we doing?

She tried to imagine how it would be down there, on the surface of Titan. In the pitch dark, laboring through freezing, sticky slush. Completely alone, without resource, save for the companions she took with her and whatever they could land.

Possibly, probably, for the rest of her life.

It would be a cold version of hell.

But her heart was beating, fast, and she smiled.

Jackie’s right, she thought. She was being selfish. Who could turn down an adventure like this?

The moment broke. The three of them pored over the map, picking out more features, assigning tentative names, on the world that awaited them.

Gareth Deeke, Air Force officer, drove steadily north on Colorado Highway 115. He drove with the windows down and his sun-roof open, despite the crisp chill of the autumn air. The sun, high and small, beat down on his scalp from the immense blue sky; but his eyes were shielded by his mirrored glasses, and visibility was good — in fact he could see for miles, as if the air was glass.

Deeke loved the mountains: the emptiness, the huge sweep of the landscape, the sense of scale and frozen geological drama opening out all around him. He relished the feeling that he was embedded like a fly in amber, in this flashbulb moment of time.

He reached the right turn for Cheyenne Mountain with regret.

He could see the car park. It was the tabletop of a plateau, which jutted out massively from the side of the mountain. The steel bodies of cars glittered on its surface, in their neat rows, like ranks of insects.

The plateau was artificial. It had been constructed by piling up the granite which Air Force engineers had scooped out of the heart of the mountain.

He really didn’t want to descend into some hole in the ground, not on a day like this.

But he had his duty.

He was pretty sure the reason he’d been summoned here today was to do with the new NASA announcement, the incredible news that they were planning to send astronauts to Saturn.

Deeke, like many within the USAF, was no fan of NASA.

He was of the same vintage as the early astronauts, but his own career had run orthogonally to the Moonwalkers’. He was an old lifting-body man: after Patuxent, he’d flown the X-15, the youngest pilot to do so. When Shuttle came along, his X-15 experience paid off. The X-15 was an unpowered glider, when it landed. Just like Shuttle.

A still-young Air Force officer, Deeke had taken the first test orbiter, Enterprise, on captive flights — where it had been strapped to the back of a 747 — and later on its first free landing tests. Then he’d flown on the third orbital flight, one of the system’s shakedown cruises.

Later, when STS had become operational, Deeke had flown exclusively Department of Defense missions on Shuttle.

Deeke and his buddies had launched reconnaissance satellites, and tried out some techniques for orbital manned reconnaissance; they’d even tried out core technology for some of the more exotic anti-satellite weaponry system proposals, like lasers and particle beams, which had come out of SDI.

Nobody outside the military knew exactly what he’d got up to on those missions. But Shuttle was, after all, a military vehicle.

But after Challenger, the military missions had dried up, and it looked as if Deeke wasn’t going to get to fly again.

Since then he’d assumed responsibility for advanced projects, in the USAF and outside. For instance he was an observer on NASA’s RLV program. It was interesting, varied, senior work.

But it wasn’t like flying. And as the years wore on, even as he got older and slowed up, he got steadily more frustrated.

But now NASA was launching this ludicrous jaunt to the outer Solar System, and he’d had the call to come here to Cheyenne from his old commander, Al Hartle, and his instincts were telling him something pretty exciting was coming down.

So here he was.

A neat little electric vehicle like a golf buggy took Deeke along the glowing length of the central tunnel, deep into the heart of the mountain. Then there was a left turn, through big blast doors — each of them steel plates three feet thick, like battleship hull — and into the heart of the command post itself.

He worked through the elaborate security clearances. He even had to pass through a series of chambers, like airlocks; at the heart of the mountain the incoming air was stringently filtered against chemical, biological and radioactive agents.

He’d been prepared for the delays; he sat patiently in the echoing, blue-painted, boxy rooms.

This complex, dug out of the granite core of the mountain, covered more than four acres. The rooms were all steel shells, supported on big metal springs which would act as shock absorbers, in the event of the nuclear attack which had never come. From this base, any aerospace battle over the U.S. would have been coordinated, and there were hot line links to the Pentagon and the White House. The place was designed to survive. It was hardened against EMP. Blast and heat from any explosion would have been channelled through that big entrance tunnel and vented on the other side of the mountain…

There was no reading matter in the waiting rooms, but there was public net access. He logged onto Time, and found himself staring at an image of the thin, serious face of Jake Hadamard, the NASA Administrator. The accompanying article lauded Hadamard and his team; the proposed Titan project was striking a chord, right now, with the public — although there was opposition, from the Luddites and various religious groups — and the project was turning out to be a “fitting capstone” to the U.S. manned space program. Far better to remember a final great triumph to conclude forty years of endeavor, than the sour memory of the Columbia fiasco. And so on.