Trouble On Titan

I’ve Never Been There

One of the most exciting things about science fiction, both reading it and writing it, is the freedom of imagination it offers to both the reader and the writer.

Its perfectly true that adventure stories, and Indian stories, and mystery stories, and stories of history and exploration are imaginative. I’d be the last to deny it But they all have strings attached. We know a great deal about the Indians, for instance—historical facts, figures, geographical data, biographies. We can’t make Sitting Bull a Navaho. We can’t write a story about the Indians that violates any of the known facts about them, and if we read a story that does, we toss the book aside and say, “That fellow isn’t much of a writer—” But in science fiction, neither the writer nor the reader has any such narrow limitations.

Perhaps I’d better modify that just a little, before the tried-and-true science fiction readers start crawling down my throat. There are limitations in science fiction which the readers demand, and which the writers must obey. But the limitations are different in science fiction—and it’s that difference that makes these stories so exciting to me.

I think Trouble on Titan is a good story to illustrate my point. Basically, this is a free-wheeling adventure story. But in writing it, I could not violate what is already proved, known fact about the background where the story is set, or the events in the course of the story. If my book had been set in San Francisco during the great earthquake, I’d have been very limited in the picture I could have painted with the story. But it wasn’t set in San Francisco. It was set on Titan, the fifth moon of Saturn—and here, my friends, we can take off with a vengeance. Because I’ve never been on Titan—and neither has anybody else!

In planning the story, I had to ask myself, “What do we really know about Titan?” A surprising amount, for a place we’ve never come close to approaching. We know, for instance, that it is a moon, circling the sixth planet of our Solar System much the same as our Moon circles the Earth. We know that it has at least eight brother and sister moons circling the same planet: Mimas, Enceladus, Tethys, Dione, Rhea, Hyperion, Japetus, and Phoebe. We even know that it might have another—Themis, which was reported by Professor Pickering in 1905, and has not been seen since. But of all these moons, we know that Titan is the largest, approximately 3,550 miles in diameter (compared to our own Moons 2,160 miles in diameter). We know that Titan makes one complete revolution around Saturn in a period of 15.94 days, that its mean distance from its planet is 759,000 miles, and that of all the moons of Saturn, Titan is the only one that has an atmosphere.

Well, that still gave me room enough to move around quite a bit. What kind of atmosphere could we look for on Titan? By use of the spectrograph, astronomers have determined that it contains large amounts of methane. The astronomers suspect ammonia, too, as well as cyanogen and water vapor. In short, a thoroughly poisonous atmosphere very similar to, but less dense than, that of Saturn herself. Further, since the structure of Saturn, like Jupiter and Uranus, is probably a huge core of rock and mineral material surrounded by a thick ice pack and an outer blanket of volatile material, it’s safe to assume that Titan would be a rather large and bitterly cold chunk of rock and metal.

You can see upon examination of these facts that we still aren’t hemmed in very much. We can have fun speculating on some of the possibilities of a planetoid with a methane atmosphere. Mines, under the surface, would require either positive pressure oxygen to enable the miners to work, or else they would have to work constantly in protective suits—a clumsy arrangement, as you know if you’ve ever hopped into a diver’s suit. But with oxygen in the tunnel, and methane on the surface—leaks would spell trouble. Still, the same principle of methane burning in oxygen would be very useful if one wanted to do some welding out on the surface—or if one wanted to pilot a small jet plane, for that matter.

There were other limitations, too. One of them was quite basic to the story, and is basic to thinking about space travel and eventual travel to other star systems.

Its a point that many science fiction writers either ignore altogether or sideswipe in a most disgraceful fashion. Taking a rocket ship to the Moon, or to Mars, or to Venus, or to Titan is one thing. Taking a rocket to another star system is quite different. The distance is prohibitive, unless a ship could somehow accelerate enough to cut the time of the star-journey down to something reasonable. But a fine old gentleman named Einstein has put the lid on that for us. The speed of light is approximately 186,000 miles per second. Thou shalt go no faster. Thou shalt not even approach that speed without having upsetting things happen—unless the current theories of the nature of space and time are way off base. And we have no right to assume that they are without a great deal of justification.

Well, to a culture which has gone to the planets, and is looking for new worlds to conquer, an interstellar drive of any sort would be quite a plum. Yet we know of one interstellar drive that exists right now—!

Trouble on Titan is a free-wheeling adventure story. It makes no claim to be anything else. But if the story of Tuck Benedict and David Torm makes you pause and think a bit, perhaps even to reshape your ideas about the people in the world about you just a trifle, it was worth the writing a thousand times over. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it!