Titan

28 May 2096: Actions

Timoshenko hovered in emptiness, staring at the slim line of the tether that attached him to the open hatch of the airlock. He didn’t remember attaching the tether. He thought he would simply drift away from the habitat forever.

I must have attached it automatically, he said to himself. Without thinking consciously of it. Just part of the routine of putting on a space suit and going outside.

He knew the tether was made of buckyball fibers. Strongest material known, he thought. My safety line. My link to life.

The tether led arrow-straight to the airlock built into the curving flank of the habitat. Timoshenko saw its huge bulk rotating slowly, carrying him with it, the mammoth cylinder studded with airlocks and observation ports. He hung there as if paralyzed and watched one of the maintenance robots scooting faithfully along its track.

Ten thousand men and women, he thought. I can kill them all. I can become a mass killer. Not as big a murderer as Stalin or some of the tsars, but at least I’ll have the distinction of killing everybody in my community. Every last one of them. One hundred percent.

Gaeta’s life-support telltales were blinking red. The leaking air tank had started a cascade of failures. Air pressure in the suit was slowly falling. The suit’s heater was automatically turning up the internal temperature to compensate. Gaeta tried to open the small emergency air tank; no response. Must’ve been blown away by the damned laser, he realized.

You got minutes, amigo, he told himself. If you don’t get off this glorified garbage truck and back to the transfer craft in the next fifteen-twenty minutes, you’re a dead man.

A flake of black snow plastered itself against his visor. Looking up, he saw that the storm had reached him. Black flakes of tholins were drifting down out of the cloud-laden sky.

Fritz’s voice crackled in his earphones. “You must leave the lander immediately and get to the escape pod before it’s covered with snow.”

“Right’” he replied. “But if I move this estúpido laser is going to zap me again.”

There’ll be no answer for twelve seconds, he knew. Fumbling in the pouches attached to the waist of his suit, Gaeta found the thin metal cylinder of the diagnostic probe for the uplink antenna. He snapped its wire off, then slowly got to his feet with a grinding of servomotors.

The laser started to swivel, but Gaeta grabbed its shaft in both his servo-reinforced pincers and pushed it upward until it was pointing at the sky. Then he forced the metal plug into the laser’s ball-and-socket mounting, jamming it in place.

“Okay, wiseass,” he muttered. “Let’s see you shoot me now.”

He could hear the laser mount’s gearing grind painfully, but the plug stayed jammed in the socket and the laser just vibrated slightly, like a horse trying to shake off an annoying fly.

Satisfied that he was safe for the moment, Gaeta scrabbled on his hands and knees back to the access hatch in the center of the roof. The lander’s roof was covered with slick black snow and it was getting rapidly thicker. As he started to push the accumulating tholins with his gloved hands, trying to clear the area where he’d dropped the comm link with Alpha’s central computer, he thought about his childhood in Los Angeles and how much he’d wanted to play in the snow when he was a kid.

“What are you doing?” von Helmholtz demanded sharply. “Get to the escape pod at once!”

“Got a job to do first, Fritz,” he said. And he clicked off his communications link.

He brushed more of the black snow off the roof. There! He found the comm line, still connected to the computer’s access panel. Picking up the loose end, Gaeta plugged it into his suit.

He was panting. Can’t be exertion, he thought. Air level’s getting low.

“Okay, computer,” he said, surprised that his throat felt raspy, “listen to me.”

No response from the central computer.

“Humans are a source of contamination, right?”

YES.

“And your logic tells you that if you uplink the data you’ve taken in from the sensors, more humans will come and contaminate the area.”

MORE HUMANS OR THEIR MACHINES.

“All right.” Gaeta coughed. “Now listen. No humans will be sent to Titan. None. I’m leaving and no humans will come here after I leave. Understand?”

For a heartbeat Gaeta thought the computer would not respond. But then its synthesized voice said flatly:

UNDERSTOOD.

The snow was falling thickly now. Gaeta felt as if he were inside an inkwell.

Brushing black flakes from his visor, he turned on his helmet lights. “And no machines will be sent to Titan either,” he said to the computer. “There will be no more contamination. Understand that? You will be the only machine on Titan and no humans will come after I leave.”

Again the computer was silent. Then:

UNDERSTOOD.

“So you can uplink the sensor data and reopen your downlink antennas. There won’t be any other sources of contamination coming here.”

The yellow message light was blinking frantically. Gaeta ignored it.

Well, I’ve done the best I could, he said to himself. Now it’s up to this bucket of chips to figure out what to do. He pulled the line from the computer’s access panel and stuffed it into a pouch at his waist, then reopened his comm link.

Gaeta clicked to his other frequency. “Fritz, it’s darker than the bottom of hell down here. You gotta talk me to the return pod.”

And then he climbed to his feet and stood erect on the edge of Alpha’s roof, waiting for Fritz to direct him back to safety.