The Sam Gunn Omnibus

Titan

Standing in an armored pressure suit on the shore of the methane sea, Jade aimed her rented camcorder at the huge fat crescent of Saturn peeking through a rare break in the clouds that filled the hazy orange sky. The planet was striped like a faded beach ball, its colors pale, almost delicate tones of yellow and pink with whitish splotches here and there. The ring system looked like a scimitar-thin line crossing its bulging middle, though the rings cast a wide solid shadow on Saturn’s oblate disk.

“Dear Spence,” Jade said into her helmet microphone. “As you can see, I’ve made it to Titan. And I truly do wish you were here. It’s eerie, strange and beautiful and kind of scary.”

The clouds scudded across the face of Saturn, blotting it from view. The sky darkened, and the perpetual gloom of Titan deepened. Jade turned slightly and focused the camera on the methane sea. It looked thick, almost oily. Near the horizon a geyser pushed slowly skyward, a slow-motion fountain of utterly cold liquid nitrogen.

“It only took two months to get here from Ceres on the high-boost ship. It was expensive, but the university runs a regularly scheduled service to the campus here. Titan’s become the hub for studies of the outer solar system, although there are actually more people living and working in the Jupiter system. Which is natural, I suppose, since they discovered those giant whale things living in the Jovian ocean.”

Waves were lapping sluggishly against the ice rocks on which Jade stood. The whole methane sea seemed to be heaving itself slowly, reluctantly toward her.

“Tidal shift,” whispered a small voice in her helmet earphones. “Please return to base.” She was being monitored by the Titan base’s automated safety cameras, of course.

“The tide’s starting to come in,” Jade said. “Time for me to get back to the base,” she swung the camera around, “up on those cliffs. I don’t know how much of it you can see in this murk, but it’s pretty comfortable—for a short visit. Like a college dormitory, I guess.”

She started walking toward the powered stairs that climbed up to the cliff top.

“I do wish you were here, Spence. Or I was there. I miss you. This will be the last interview for the Sam Gunn biography. I’ll be coming back to Selene after this. It’ll take six months, even at constant boost, but I’m looking forward to getting back home. Please video me back as soon as you can.”

Two months of enforced inactivity aboard the plasma torch ship that had brought her to Titan had given Jade plenty of time to think about Spence Johansen.

She wanted to end her video message with “I love you,” but found that she could not. I’m not sure of myself, she realized. I’m not sure of him. There’ll be time enough for that when I get back, she told herself. Then she added ruefully, if Spence hasn’t married again by then.

Solomon Goodman looked very young to be a famous professor and Noble laureate. He’s not much more than thirty, she told herself.

Unlike most of the other people she had interviewed, Professor Goodman had no qualms about talking to her. He had immediately acceded to her request for an interview even before Jade had reached Ceres, and had personally set her up with a reservation aboard the plasma torch ship that had brought her out to Titan.

Now she sat in his office. What looked like a large picture window was actually a smart screen, she realized. A beautifully clear image of Saturn showed on it, obviously taken from a satellite camera above Titan’s perpetual cloud cover. Jade could see the mysterious spokes in Saturn’s rings and the streaks of pale colors banding the planet’s oblate body.

Goodman sat slouched in a pseudo-leather couch, his long legs stretched out, almost touching Jade’s booted feet. She pictured him as a skinny, gangling student even though he was now getting pudgy, potbellied. His hair was still quite dark and thickly curled; his slightly puffy face could look quite pleasant when he smiled.

A robot had brought a tray of tea things and deposited them on the low table between the couch and the padded chair on which Jade was sitting.

“One of the perks of university life,” Goodman said, almost defensively. “Real old English tea in the afternoon. I got into the habit when I was at Oxford. Really gives you a lift for the later part of the day.”

Jade let him pour a cup of steaming tea for her, then added a bit of milk herself. The tea service was real china, brought in all the way from Earth. The Nobel prize brought its privileges, she thought.

“So what do you want to know about Sam?” Goodman asked, smiling at her. Jade noticed that he had large hands; they dwarfed the delicate cup and saucer he was holding.

“Well,” Jade said, turning on the recorder in her belt, “you were the last person to see him alive, weren’t you?”

His smile faded. He put the cup and saucer down on the tray in front of him.

Looking up at Jade with an almost guilty expression on his face, Goodman said, “I guess you could say that I killed Sam Gunn.”