TIME, TIDES, AND TITAN

Edouard Urbain imagined himself standing on the shore of Titan’s hydrocarbon sea.

Larger than the planet Mercury, Titan is a cold and dark world, some ten times farther from the Sun than Earth is. Only pale and weak sunlight filters through the clouds and smog of Titan’s thick, murky atmosphere.

Urbain pictured himself standing on an outcropping of ice, staring through his spacesuit helmet’s visor at the black, oily sea surging across the rough, jumbled ice field below. In the distance a sooty “snowstorm” was approaching, a wall of black hydrocarbon flakes blotting out the horizon as it came closer.

Then the bleak, frozen landscape suddenly grew brighter. He looked up, and the breath caught in his throat. The clouds had broken for a moment and he could see Saturn riding high above, magnificently beautiful, ten times larger than a full Moon on Earth, its rings a slim knife edge slicing across the middle of the gaudily striped body of the planet. There is no lovelier sight in the entire solar system, he thought.

But the tide was coming in. Pulled by the immense gravitational power of Saturn, the hydrocarbon sea was a frothing tidal wave swiftly advancing across the broken landscape of ice, a slimy crawling monster swallowing everything in its path, submerging spires and boulder-sized chunks of ice, covering the frozen ground in hissing, bubbling black oil, flooding the world from horizon to horizon. Soon it would drown even the prominence Urbain was standing on, slithering halfway across Titan before reversing its course.

Someday I will stand by that sea, Urbain told himself, equipped to sample it and search for living organisms in the black, oily liquid. Someday.

He sighed and looked around his cramped little office, returning to reality. No one will go to the surface of Titan, not for many years to come, he knew.

Then his eyes fell on the three-dimensional schematic of the landing vehicle that hovered above his desk. It looked bulky and cumbersome, but to Urbain it was the epitome of pragmatic elegance. You will go down to Titan’s surface, my beauty, Urbain said silently to the drawing.

Designing the lander had been little more than child’s play, he realized. It was being built by his engineers and technicians, under his meticulous direction. That much was actually rather simple.

The big accomplishment was carrying it to Saturn, establishing this habitat in orbit around the ringed planet, where Urbain and his scientists could control the lander in real time.

Time had defeated earlier attempts to explore Titan remotely. It took more than an hour to send a signal from Earth to Saturn, even when the two planets were at their closest. Remotely-controlled probes failed, no matter how sophisticated they were, because of that time lag. For decades scientists on Earth gnashed their teeth in frustration as one probe after another trundled blithely into a crevasse or was blanketed in oily black snow, simply because it took hours for their human controllers to get the proper commands to them.

No longer, Urbain told himself. Now we will control the lander from a mere few light-seconds away. If necessary, we can establish a command post in orbit around Titan itself and cut the reaction time to less than a second.

But no human will set foot on Titan, he knew. Not for many years. The thought saddened him, in his heart of hearts. He wanted to plant his own boots on that cold, dark, black-ice surface. Deep in the place where he kept his most secret desires, Edouard Urbain wanted to be the first man to reach the surface of Titan.

DEPARTURE PLUS 317 DAYS

“Jezoo, it’s like a movie set down here.”

Holly was leading Manuel Gaeta along the utilities tunnel that ran beneath the village. Overhead lights flicked on automatically as they walked along the tunnel, then went dark again once they had passed. The walls were lined with electrical conduits, plumbing pipes, valves, control panels, phone screens spaced every hundred meters. More pipes ran overhead, color coded blue for potable water, yellow for sewage heading to the recyclers, red for hot water going to the waste heat radiators outside the habitat. The tunnel hummed with the constant throb of pumps and electrical equipment. Holly could feel the metal deck plates vibrating through the soles of her softboots.

“What’s a movie set?” she asked.

“Where they shoot vids,” Gaeta replied, eying all the ductwork around them as they moved along the tunnel. “You know, if they need to do a scene in ancient Rome they build a set to look like ancient Rome.”

“Oh. Sure. I click. But how does this look like a movie set?” He grinned at her. “Like the back side of a set. They’re all fake, just a facade, usually made out of plastic. You go behind, it’s all propped up with girders and scaffolds.”

“And this reminds you of that?” she asked, puzzled.

“Kinda,” he replied. “I mean, a couple dozen meters over our heads is the village—”

“No, we’re past the village now,” Holly corrected. “We’re underneath the park, heading for the farms.”

“Whatever. Up top it all looks so real, but down here you realize it’s all fakery.”

“It is not!” she said, with some heat. “It’s as real as real can be. You eat the food we grow on the farms, don’t you? You sleep in an apartment in the village. How real can it get?”

Gaeta held up both hands in a mock surrender. “Hey, whoa. Don’t take it so personal. I just meant, this whole habitat is an artificial construction. It looks like a real village and real farms and all that, but when you’re down here you realize it’s all inside a big machine.”

“Well, f’sure,” Holly said. “Everybody knows that.”

They walked in silence for a while, the overhead lights turning on for them and off again once they passed. Like magic, Holly thought. Then she remembered that she should have been in the office, working. But this is fun, she told herself, exploring the tunnels. Why work all the time? A person ought to have a little fun now and then.

The tunnel branched up ahead, and one wall opened up to reveal another tunnel that crossed theirs at a lower level.

“This way,” Holly said, swinging a leg over the guardrail.

“Down there?” Gaeta asked.

“Sure.” She flipped over the metal railing, grasped its bottom rung and hung there for an instant, then dropped to the metal flooring of the lower tunnel, four meters below.

“Come on,” Holly called up to Gaeta. “It’s a shortcut to the farms.”

He leaned over the rail, looking dubious. Then slowly, methodically, he clambered over the rail and let himself drop down beside her, landing lightly on the balls of his feet.

“For a stunt guy,” she chided, “you’re warping cautious.”

“That’s how a stunt guy stays in one piece,” he replied, grinning. “There are old stuntmen and bold stuntmen, but there are no old, bold stuntmen.”

Holly laughed, understanding.

“How far to the farms?” Gaeta asked.

“Not far now.”

“How far?”

She wrinkled her brow for a moment, then answered, “Less than three kilometers.”

“You certain of that?”

“I’ve got all the tunnels memorized,” Holly told him.

“All of them? Every one? Every kilometer?”

“Every centimeter.”

He laughed. “All up in your head, huh?” he teased, tapping his own temple.

Holly pulled her handheld from her tunic pocket and pressed the locater key with her thumb. The screen showed a schematic of the tunnels that threaded beneath the habitat’s landscaping, with a blinking red cursor identifying their location.

Gaeta peered at the little screen over her shoulder. She could feel his warm breath on the back of her neck, sense his body heat.

“I’ll be damned,” he said, slightly awestruck. “You were right on the button.”