The slush was rising. It would reach her head in a few seconds. She tried not to struggle.

So quickly, it was over.

Heat and cold, she thought; fire and ice. That’s what separates Siobhan and me: fire and ice, at the extremities of the Solar System.

The slush forced its way through her faceplate, driving shards of plexiglass before it.

After its muddy splashdown, Command Module CM-115 settled deeper into the icy slush of Titan, its aluminum hull creaking as it cooled.

A wall-mounted camera peered at Benacerraf, as she lay in her couch, making history. She felt flat, deflated, battered by the events of the entry, the loss of contact with Nicola.

But she had her role to play.

She said, “Houston, Bifrost. Tartarus Base here. We have landed.”

“Amen to that.” said Rosenberg.

Without enthusiasm, she imagined how their words would be collected by Cassini and hurled across eighty light minutes, dispersing and growing fainter, to whoever on Earth was left to listen…

She turned her head. Every neck muscle ached; her head felt like a sack of water, ungainly and heavy, strapped to the top of her spine.

Rosenberg was sitting in the left-hand couch, Benacerraf the right. Angel was sandwiched between them in the center couch, his bony body swathed in its bubble of orange pressure suit, pressed up against Benacerraf. He was apparently at peace, Benacerraf thought, his sedated madness contained for now within the orange high-technology bubble of his suit.

The window to her right was already frosted, the condensation from their breath and sweat frozen against the glass. She could see little of the landscape, in the murky twilight beyond. Even after just a few minutes on the surface, the tholin drizzle had coated the windows of Bifrost with a thin, purple-brown, organic scum; it streaked down the window like leaking oil.

The contrast with the warm, brightly-lit, mundane interior of the Apollo was marked; to leave here, she thought, would be like stepping out of your mom’s kitchen into a stormy night.

But Rosenberg seemed to feel differently. Elated.

“We’re here,” Rosenberg said. “My God.”

“Yes. We’re here. But do you really think anybody gives a damn any more?”

“I do,” he said, his tone defiant. “I do. We achieved what we set out to achieve. This is Apollo 11, all over again.” He turned to face her; there was a smile on his face, framed by his open visor. “This is history, Paula. There’s a new world out there. You’ll be the first: the first since Armstrong—”

“No,” she snapped. “Nicola was the first, whatever has happened to Jitterbug. Don’t you ever forget that.”

Rosenberg turned away, and for a moment there was silence, broken only by the hum of the Command Module’s systems.

She released her restraints.

The Apollo Command Module wasn’t designed to land anywhere but Earth. So, it didn’t have an airlock. When Benacerraf opened the hatch, all the Earth-like air inside the cabin was going to be lost, to be replaced by Titan’s methane-laced nitrogen. So all three of them, Angel included, would have to be in their EMUs — their extravehicular mobility units, their surface suits.

Therefore, by remorseless logic, Benacerraf and Rosenberg were going to have to strip and dress Angel.

Benacerraf got hold of the frame of her couch and pushed herself upright. The Command Module was so small her head was almost brushing the instrument panel above her.

There was a dull ringing in her ears. The colors leached from the instrument panel, and everything turned a dull golden-brown.

“Oh,” she said. “Oh, wow.”

Rosenberg was sitting up too, his face grey. “Just take it easy, Paula. Sit for a while. Let your body figure out which way is up.”

“This one-seventh gravity is a killer, huh.”

She could feel her heart laboring to pump blood up this unaccustomed gravity gradient. And this, she thought dismally, was with the assistance of the G-suit that was still compressing the slack blood vessels of her legs.

Slowly — after maybe ten minutes — the ringing subsided, and the colors returned. Her heart was still hammering, though.

Benacerraf knelt on her couch. With Rosenberg’s help she reached over Angel, and hauled him off his couch and onto her own. His space-attenuated body weighed an effective thirty or forty pounds, she estimated. But even so it took real effort, by both of them, to wrestle him around the cluttered little cabin.

When Angel was transferred, she released latches and folded up his center couch, and stowed it away in the lower equipment bay, the roomier space beneath the couches. Now she was able to stand. With Rosenberg beside her, she began to work on the inert Angel.

She twisted off Angel’s helmet and gloves. She detached the umbilical tubes which connected his suit to the cabin’s life support supplies, and pulled off his boots. Then, with Rosenberg, she hauled the heavy, elasticated pressure garment off Angel’s limp, unresponsive limbs.

Underneath, Angel was already wearing his basic thermal underwear, with his Heating Garment over the top and a G-suit — inflatable rubber trousers — over that. Benacerraf began to strip off the G-suit.

Next she had to fit Angel’s urine collector, a huge, unlikely condom.

She took a deep breath. She reached down and pushed her hand inside Angel’s underwear. His groin was warm and faintly damp, she found, disgusted. She pulled Angel’s penis out of his underwear.

Rosenberg laughed. “Where no man has gone before.”

“Shut up, Rosenberg.”

As she tried to push the condom over Angel’s penis, he started to move. He was grinding his hips. She looked into his face. His ruined eyes were closed, of course, but there was a grin stretching his lips; a thin sheen of saliva glistened on his lower lip.

He was getting an erection; his grinding was pushing the penis against the palm of her hand.

She snatched her hands away. “Shit,” she said.

Rosenberg laughed again. “Hot mike, commander.”

“Fuck you, Rosenberg. Bill? Bill, can you hear me?”

Angel crooned wordlessly, rocking his head to left and right.

Rosenberg pressed an infuser to Angel’s neck. Angel subsided, almost immediately. “Old bastard,” Rosenberg said without malice. “The only bit of him that still works is his libido.”

“And how,” Benacerraf said, “are we going to get rid of that?”

At Angel’s groin, the erection sprouted like a miniature flagpole, the veins thick.

Rosenberg grinned. “I always thought Bill was all hat and no horse.”

“It’s not funny, Rosenberg.”

“Don’t worry.” He reached down to a storage compartment and pulled out a stainless steel spoon. He pressed its bowl against the frosty glass of the window behind him, and tapped the tip of Angel’s glans with the chilled bowl.

Angel grunted and stirred.

The penis sagged immediately, like a deflated balloon.

“A nurse’s trick I picked up during my med training,” Rosenberg said. “Never thought I’d have to use it. And now I’m going to mark this damn spoon, to make sure I never eat with it.”

Grimacing, Benacerraf reached down once more and tucked Angel’s penis briskly into the condom.

With Rosenberg’s help, she lifted Angel into his Beta-cloth outer garment. The sleeves and neck were terminated with steel rings that would snap onto Angel’s EVA gloves and helmet. Now she fitted a tube over his condom attachment; there was a bag sewn into the outer garment to store a couple of pints of urine. Angel was already wearing a kind of diaper — an absorbent undergarment — that would soak up any bowel movement he couldn’t defer.

Benacerraf hoped like hell he would defer. Wiping Angel’s ass for him was one chore she hadn’t yet had to endure, one aspect of Angel’s descent into hell where he’d managed, so far, to hang onto a little dignity.