Titan

27 December 2095: Afternoon

The computations of time that humans use meant nothing on the cloud-shrouded shore of the frozen sea. Titan Alpha sat where it had landed, unmoving, uncommunicative. But not inert.

Its sensors were making measurements. Outside temperature-181 degrees Celsius. Atmospheric pressure 1,734 millibars. Atmospheric composition: nitrogen, methane, ethane, minor hydrocarbons and nitrogen compounds. Tactile pads in its treads reported on the tensile strength of the spongy ground. Infrared cameras swept across the landscape, recording the black snow that was sifting down from the dirty-orange clouds slithering sluggishly across the sky.

Titan Alpha’s internal logic circuits concluded that the broad expanse of dark and flat material down at the base of the bluffs must be an ice-crusted liquid of some sort. Microwave radar detected waves surging sluggishly beneath the crust, making it heave and crack. A sea. Priorities built into the central computer’s master program demanded that the sea’s composition be investigated. Titan Alpha fired a microsecond burst of ten megajoules from the laser mounted in the swivel turret on its roof. The mass spectrometer identified a host of chemical compounds in the ice evaporated by the laser: water ice mostly, but lots of methane and other hydrocarbons as well.

The command protocol built into the communications system called for transmitting these data through the main uplink antenna. But a subroutine in the computer’s master program prevented this. No communications outside. Store the data but do not communicate. Wait. Observe and wait.

“It’s what we call engineer’s hell,” said one of the engineers who had helped to design and build Titan Alpha. “Everything checks but nothing works.”

Urbain sat at the head of the conference table, outwardly calm and under control. Only the slight tic beneath his right eye betrayed the tension within him.

His eight lead engineers sat around the oval conference table. One of the conference room’s smart walls displayed schematics of Titan Alpha’s various systems: propulsion, electrical power, sensors, communications and more. Urbain had not invited his scientists to this meeting; the problem with Titan Alpha was one of engineering. Something had malfunctioned and it was up to his engineering staff to determine what had gone wrong and to fix it. Besides, the scientists would swamp the meeting with bright ideas they hatched on the spur of the moment and drive everyone to distraction.

He was surprised and annoyed, then, when the young woman who was supposed to be monitoring the satellite hovering over Titan Alpha’s landing site burst into the conference room.

“It fired the laser!” she fairly shouted without preamble or even asking pardon for interrupting the meeting. “Squirted off a shot into the Lazy H Sea.”

Urbain jumped to his feet. “Are you certain?”

“Got it on vid,” she said excitedly.

Without bothering to adjourn the meeting, Urbain raced for the door and down the corridor toward the control center, followed by all eight of the engineers.

The control center was much quieter than two days earlier. Wexler and the other VIPs were preparing to leave Goddard and head back to Earth. Urbain desperately wanted to have some results from Titan Alpha before they left.

The young scientist slipped into the chair of her console and clapped her headset on. She spoke briefly into the pin-sized microphone at her lips and her display screen lit up.

Urbain had placed an observation satellite in synchronous orbit above the site of the landing, a feat that was not as easy as he’d first thought it would be. Synchronous orbit for a body revolving as slowly as Titan was hundreds of thousands of kilometers above the moon’s surface. And although the satellite included a two-kilometer-long tether system that was designed to generate electrical power for its internal systems and maintain itself in proper position, unexpected bursts of electromagnetic energy from Saturn had incapacitated the tether, making it necessary to use positioning thrusters to keep the satellite in place. Constantly perturbed by the gravitational pulls of mammoth Saturn and its rings, the satellite devoured station-keeping fuel ravenously to maintain itself in its proper position; Urbain had already been forced to schedule a refueling mission.

Standing behind the seated woman, he bent over her shoulder and stared at the display screen: nothing more than a mottled sphere of dull orange. “Where is the infrared view?” he demanded impatiently.

The young woman held up a finger as she muttered into her mike. The sphere on the screen abruptly changed. The clouds disappeared and Urbain could see the bright glints of Titan’s rolling, hilly ground and the dark shapes of its seas. One looked like the head of a dragon, another somewhat like a child’s drawing of a dog. Then there was the H-shaped one, where Titan Alpha had landed.

“Magnification,” he snapped.

The view zoomed in. The H shape of the methane sea was oriented east-west, rather than standing up as the letter is made in actual writing. Nearly a century earlier the Americans, with their usual cowboy attitude, had dubbed it the Lazy H Sea.

“That’s the best magnification we can get,” said the scientist.

Urbain could not see his lander. We need satellites in lower orbits, he told himself. An entire fleet of them so that Titan Alpha is under constant surveillance.

“So?” he insisted. “Where is this laser flash?”

“I’m running it back—there! Didja see it? I’ll run it forward again.”

Urbain saw the briefest of glints on the edge of the methane sea. He straightened up, disappointed. “It might have been a sparkle in the electronics. A bad pixel.”

The young woman shook her head stubbornly. “No, I checked its duration and it’s consistent with a laser pulse. Just a small squirt, no more than ten kilojoules. Ran the light through a spectral analysis, too, and it’s water and methane and the other carbon gunk from the sea.”

Urbain stared down at her. “Titan Alpha actually fired its laser?”

“Yes, sir, it surely did.”

One of the engineers said, “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you, Dr. Urbain. We’re still getting telemetry from the lander. It’s sending up continuous data on its internal condition. Everything’s working fine.”

“But it will not uplink data from its sensors.”

“That’s the one glitch,” the engineer admitted.

Urbain glared at him. “This glitch, as you put it, makes Titan Alpha useless, pointless, stupid.”

Returning his glare without blinking, the engineer insisted, “I think it’s the central computer. Some kind of error in the programming. Everything is fine in the lander except for the data uplink. For some reason it’s not sending data back to us. The sensors seem to be working as designed, but the vehicle isn’t uplinking the data it’s collecting. It’s got to be a computer glitch.”

“In other words,” Urbain said coldly, “you are telling me that the patient is in fine condition, except that she is catatonic.”