Titan

28 May 2096: Titan landing

As she entered the bio lab, Cardenas saw a knot of white-smocked biologists clustered around Negroponte’s workbench. Pulling her palmcomp from her jacket pocket as she hurried toward them, she checked Manny’s mission timeline: he was due to land on Titan’s surface in less than five minutes.

This had better be good for her to call me here, Cardenas told herself, as she reached the men and women crowded around Negroponte’s bench.

“Excuse me,” she said, elbowing past the first few.

“Dr. Cardenas,” said one of the men. She recognized him as Da’ud Habib. At the sound of her name the others parted to make way for her.

“Kris!” Negroponte called out.

“What is it?” Cardenas asked. “What’s going on?”

Negroponte looked disheveled, excited, not at all like the tall, cool, reserved woman Cardenas had become accustomed to.

“Look at this,” she said, tapping on her keyboard. “It’s from the MRF microscope.” The display screen on her bench blurred, then steadied. “This is speeded up from real time by a factor of twenty thousand.”

Staring at the screen, Cardenas saw one of the ring creatures vibrating slowly inside its particle of ice. Then, as her eyes grew wider and wider, the creature extruded a mandible and began to pull together flecks of dust from its surroundings.

“It’s assembling …” Cardenas heard her own voice, hollow, breathless.

None of the others moved. No one seemed even to breathe. They’ve all seen this before, Cardenas realized. Yolanda’s shown it to them before I got here. But still they watched in silent, frozen awe.

The thing in the ice moved purposively, pulling dark flecks of dust to itself, taking smaller bits from the dust and then adding them to the object it was constructing.

“Molecular engineering,” a man whispered. Habib, Cardenas realized dimly, as she watched the microscope display.

“It’s constructing a daughter object,” Cardenas breathed.

“Constructing it from molecules within the dust grains inside the ice particle,” Negroponte said.

“It is a nanomachine.”

The group of biologists crowding around the workbench seemed to stir, like a bed of sea anemones swayed by an ocean current. They all seemed to exhale, sighing almost, at the same moment.

“Nanomachines,” Negroponte said.

“How … ?”

“Who put them there?”

Habib said, “We’ve got to inform the ICU about this.”

“And Nadia,” said Negroponte. “She’s got to know right away.”

In a corner of her mind Cardenas marveled at how subdued they were, how quiet and stricken with wonderment. None of the usual brash excitement. No shouting claims that this was the greatest discovery since … Cardenas hesitated. The greatest discovery ever made, she thought. We’ve discovered extraterrestrial intelligence, she realized. Some intelligent species seeded the rings of Saturn with nanomachines.

Why? When?

The insistent jangle of a phone broke the eerie silence. Turning, almost angry at the interruption, Cardenas saw Habib pull his handheld from his tunic pocket.

“Yes, sir,” he said in a subdued voice, glancing at all the eyes focused on him. “Yes, of course. Right away, sir.”

He folded the handheld shut and stuffed it back in his pocket. “Urbain,” he said, apologetically. “Gaeta’s about to land on Alpha and Dr. Urbain wants me at the control center right away.”

“I can see the machine!” Gaeta sang out.

His parasail had deployed on schedule, a huge plastic wing that arched above him like a beautiful rainbow. He glided slowly through Titan’s thick, gloomy atmosphere, swaying slightly beneath the graceful arc of the broad parasail.

“We’re getting your visual,” Fritz said, then in a rare burst of approval he added, “Good work.”

Urbain’s voice cut in. “Can you land atop Alpha? We mustn’t contaminate the organisms living in the ground.”

Gaeta held back an angry retort. This is his baby, he told himself. There’s no way Fritz could’ve kept him out of the loop.

“I’ll try,” he said.

From the mission briefings, Gaeta knew the machine was as big as an old semitrailer rig. I oughtta be able to land on its roof, no sweat, he thought. But he made no promises to Urbain, not even the suggestion of one. Easy enough to promise when we were in the conference room; this is reality now.

A flash of light caught his eye, off to the left of the stranded Alpha by maybe a hundred meters. The return pod, he thought.

“Escape pod has landed,” Fritz confirmed, “seventy-two meters from Alpha’s location.”

So I’ll have to walk across Urbain’s precious ground seventy-two meters after I’ve fixed his machine, Gaeta thought. Hope el jefe doesn’t give himself a hernia over that. Or maybe he’d like it better if I just stay on the machine’s roof and die after I’ve fixed it for him.

No time for busting balls, Gaeta told himself. Better get to work. He began manipulating the parasail’s control cords, dipping leftward slightly as he sank toward the immobile roving vehicle. Alpha looked ghostly white down there, except for parallel bands of bright red that ran along its flanks. Radiators rejecting heat from its nuclear power source, Gaeta understood. Looks like racing stripes, kinda neat.

It was coming up fast now. There was no wind to speak of, just a continual sluggish flow that Gaeta easily accounted for as he sank down toward the roof of Urbain’s rover. The ground around the machine looked dark, muddy, somehow menacing.

“Say something.” Berkowitz’s voice, pleading for something colorful to pipe to the VR audience.

Gaeta snapped, “Kinda busy here. Trying for a bull’s-eye, pal.”

“Fifty meters,” Fritz called out his altitude.

“This is the tricky part,” Gaeta said. Alpha’s roof filled his visor now. He clicked the release catches and dropped the last few meters like a dead weight as the parasail glided off into the murky distance. With a clump! that jarred his innards Gaeta hit the vehicle’s roof. His momentum pushed him to his knees and he put out his gloved hands to stop himself from tumbling over the edge of the roof.

For a few heart-pounding moments he remained on his hands and knees, puffing hard. Then, “I’m down. I’m on Alpha’s rooftop.”

“Good,” said Fritz.

Urbain had locked himself in his office to follow the stuntman’s mission through a closed-loop hookup with the mission controllers. Von Helmholtz had offered him a virtual-reality rig, but Urbain had rejected it. I am here to rescue Alpha, he told himself, not to indulge in vicarious entertainment.

Alpha’s controllers were down the hall at their consoles, he knew, and also linked to his desktop electronically. Urbain had ordered Habib and the rest of his computer team to stand by at the control center. Everything is in readiness, Urbain told himself. Everyone is at their posts.

He had not realized how tightly he’d been wound until Gaeta announced, “I’m down. I’m on Alpha’s rooftop.” At that instant Urbain felt everything inside him turn to jelly. He slumped in his desk chair, too weak to lift his arms, barely able to breathe. Am I having a stroke? he asked himself. A heart attack? His face felt flushed, he was perspiring, yet he felt cold, almost shivering.

For several moments he sat there, unable to move. Then, with a deep shuddering breath, he pulled himself straighter in the chair.

He’s there with Alpha, Urbain told himself. Now the real work begins.

Gaeta reviewed his mission priorities, listed on the display splashed across one side of his visor. Check the uplink antenna. Establish contact with the master computer program. Deploy the nanomachine package to build a new uplink antenna.

Mentally he added a final priority. Get your ass out of here as soon as you can.

Climbing to his feet with a whirr and buzz of servomotors moving his arms and legs, Gaeta slowly turned around to survey the scene.

“I’m on the surface of Titan,” he announced for the benefit of the paying audience. “Standing on the roof of the roving vehicle Titan Alpha. This is not a sightseeing stunt, though. I’m here to repair Alpha and get it functioning again.”

Pecking at the keyboard inside his suit, Gaeta displayed the schematic of the uplink antenna. It was built into the forward section of the roof, half a dozen steps from where he stood. He wriggled his arm back into the suit’s sleeve and stepped carefully toward the thin lines that marked the antenna’s location.

Berkowitz’s voice came through his earphones. “We’re hearing an odd sighing sound, almost like a moan. Can you tell us what it is?”

Suppressing his irritation at being interrupted, Gaeta said curtly, “That’s the wind. You’re hearing the wind of Titan. It’s slow but steady, sort of like an ocean tide on Earth.”

Now let me get to work, he added silently.

It was difficult to look down at his boots from inside the cumbersome suit, so Gaeta stopped about a meter short of the roof’s front edge and swept his eyes along the antenna’s hairline pattern. The cameras built into his helmet were slaves to the motions of his eyes, so he knew that Urbain and his staff—and the paying customers linked to him through virtual reality—were seeing what he saw.

The audience won’t see this for a couple of hours, he thought. Takes more’n an hour to get a signal to Earth, and the censors there are delaying the broadcast just in case something comes up that frosts the religious cabrons.

“I don’t see any damage to the antenna,” Gaeta said.

For several moments he heard nothing but the hiss of static coming from the stars in his earphones. Fritz spoke up: “Urbain’s people are analyzing the imagery.”

“Looks okay to me,” Gaeta repeated. He stepped up the magnification of his optical sensors. No breaks in the antenna, no sign of damage anywhere in sight.

“Let them make that decision,” said Fritz.

Gaeta straightened up and turned slowly in a full circle, panning so that his audience could see the surface of Titan.

“This is Titan,” he said for the benefit of his audience. “It’s kinda like a smoggy day in L.A. But no buildings, no lights, no traffic or noise. You can hear the breeze, but nothing else is moving down here.” Pointing with an outstretched arm, he went on, “The ground’s kinda gooey looking. Most of it’s bland and dark in color, rolling gently. Reminds me of snowbanks after a blizzard. But this ‘snow’ is black, dull: seems to absorb light instead of reflect it.”

He looked outward toward the horizon. “Not a star in the sky, not even a glow to mark where the Sun is. Wait. There’s a smudge of something up there. Saturn, maybe. It’s just too cloudy to see anything clearly.”

Not much of a scenic view for the customers, Gaeta thought.

Fritz’s voice startled him out of his sightseeing. “Urbain wants to talk to you.”

“Fine. Patch him through.”

Several seconds of hesitation, then Urbain’s tight, tense voice. “Mr. Gaeta, your equipment includes a diagnostic probe for the uplink antenna.”

“Right,” he replied. “Got it right here on my belt.” He patted the pouch at his waist with a gloved hand.

“Please connect the probe to the antenna’s maintenance receptacle.”

“Okay.”

It was clumsy, digging the pencil-slim diagnostic probe from the pouch with his gloved hand. Gaeta nearly dropped the slender cylinder. Then he had to kneel down in the suit, no easy task, to insert the probe into the antenna’s test slot.

“Done,” he said at last, blinking sweat from his eyes.

“Good. Please activate the probe.”

“Activating.”

Urbain leaned forward in his desk chair, watching on his desktop display as Gaeta connected the probe to the antenna testing circuitry.

The antenna’s circuit schematic flashed onto the display screen. No breaks, Urbain saw. Current is flowing through the circuit as designed. The antenna is functional. There’s nothing wrong with it.

Licking his lips nervously, Urbain commanded, “Uplink stored data,” speaking as clearly as he knew how. His command was relayed at the speed of light to the control center, then to the commsats in orbit around Titan and finally to Alpha’s central computer.

Nearly twelve seconds ticked by, as slowly as drops of blood dripping from a wound.

Uplink command aborted.

The words burned on Urbain’s display screen like a branding iron searing his flesh.

His voice quavering slightly, Urbain repeated, “Uplink all stored data.”

Uplink command aborted.

Urbain pounded a fist on his desk so hard that pain shot up the length of his arm.

He saw the yellow message light begin to blink in the lower corner of his screen. The data bar running along the screen’s bottom showed it was Habib, calling from the control center. “Answer,” Urbain gasped, rubbing his throbbing arm.

“Dr. Urbain,” said Habib, his neatly bearded face filling the screen, erasing the damning words. “We should link with the master program. Only the master program has the option of aborting commands.”

Urbain closed his eyes momentarily. Then, as calmly as he could, he replied, “Very well. Tell the stuntman to link with the master program.”