fall on a deaf world. Think about that. And as for JPL, those sharks in the USAF have been waiting for something like Columbia, waiting for NASA to weaken. It’s as if they’re taking revenge. They’re going to turn us into a DoD-dedicated laboratory. The NASA links will be severed, and we’ll lose the space work, and all of our research will be classified, for good and all. The Pentagon calls it weaponization.’
‘Rosenberg –’
He looked into the sky. ‘Paula, in another decade, the planets are going to be no more than what they were, before 1960: just lights in the sky. The space program is over at last, killed by NASA and the USAF and the aerospace companies …’
No, she thought automatically. It’s more complex than that. It always was. The space program is a major national investment. It’s been shaped from the beginning by political, economic, technical factors, beyond anyone’s control …
And yet, she thought, standing here in the arroyo dust, she had the instinctive sense that Rosenberg was right. We’ve blown it. We could have done a hell of a lot more. We could have sent robot probes everywhere, multiplied our understanding a hundredfold.
Lights in the sky. That phrase snagged at her. She thought of the forty-year-old Moon photographs. At the LAX bookstalls she’d found rows of astrology books, on the science shelves. Was that the future she wanted to bequeath her grandchildren?
The sense of claustrophobia, of enclosure, she’d felt since returning to Earth increased.
‘Rosenberg, what is it you want?’
He put on his glasses and looked at her. ‘I want you people to start paying back.’
‘I’m listening.’
He guided her back towards the main campus. ‘If you had a free choice, which planet would you choose to go to? The Moon is dead, Venus is an inferno, and Mars is an ice ball, with a few fossils we might dig out of the deep rocks if we sent a team of geologists up there for a century.’
‘Then where?’
‘Titan,’ he said. ‘Titan …’
He led her to his cubicle in the science back room. It was piled deep with papers, journals, printout; the walls were coated with softscreens.
He sat down. He cleared a softscreen and dug out a Cassini image; it showed the shadowed limb of a smooth, orange-brown globe, billiard-ball featureless. ‘The Cassini-Huygens results have already taught us a hell of a lot about Titan,’ Rosenberg said. ‘It’s a moon of Saturn. But it’s as big as Mercury; hell, it’s a world in its own right. If it wasn’t in orbit around Saturn, if it had its own solar orbit, maybe we would have justified a mission to Titan for its own sake by now …’
Rosenberg brought up a low-altitude image, taken by the Huygens probe a few hundred yards above the surface. The quality was good, though the illumination was low. It was a landscape, she realized suddenly, and Rosenberg expanded on what she saw.
… A reddish colour dominated everything, although swathes of darker, older material streaked the landscape. Towards the horizon, beyond the slushy plain below, there were rolling hills with peaks stained dark red and yellow, with slashes of ochre on their flanks. But they were mountains of ice, not rock. An ethane lake had eroded the base of the hills, and there were visible scars in the hills’ profiles.
Clouds, red and orange, swirled above the hills and flooded the craters …
It was extraordinarily beautiful. Benacerraf felt she was being drawn into the screen, and she wanted to step through and float down through the thick air, her boots crunching into that slushy surface.
Rosenberg said, ‘Titan is the only moon in the Solar System with air, an atmosphere double the mass of Earth’s, mostly nitrogen, with some methane and hydrogen. The sunlight breaks down the methane into tholins – a mixture of hydrocarbons, nitriles and other polymers. That’s the orange-brown smog you can see here. Titan is an ice moon, pocked with craters, which are flooded with ethane. Crater lakes, Paula. The tholins rain out on the surface all the time; Huygens landed in a tholin slush, and we figure there is probably a layer, in some places a hundred yards thick, laid down over the dry land. Titan is an organic chemistry paradise …’
Benacerraf felt faintly bored. ‘I know about the science, Rosenberg.’
‘Paula, I want you to start thinking of Titan in a different way: not as a site of some vague scientific interest, but a resource.’
‘Resource?’
He began to snap out his words, precise, rehearsed. ‘Think about what we have here. Titan is an organic-synthesis machine, way off in the outer Solar System, which we can tune to serve Earthly life. It could become a factory, churning out fibres, food, any organic-chemistry product you like. Such as CHON food.’
‘Huh?’
‘Food manufactured from carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen. Paula, we know how to do this. Generally the comets have been suggested as an off-Earth resource for such raw materials. Titan’s a hell of a lot closer than most comets, and has vastly more mass besides.’ She could not help but see how his mind was working, so clear were his speculations, so transparent his body language.
‘So a colony could survive there,’ she said.
‘More than that. You could export foodstuffs to other colonies, to the inner planets, to Earth itself.’
She nodded. ‘Maybe. There must be cheaper ways to boost the food supply, though … What about a shorter term payoff?’
‘Oh, that’s easy. Helium – 3, from Saturn.’
‘Huh?’
He said patiently, ‘We mine helium – 3 from Saturn’s outer atmosphere, by scooping it off, and export it to Earth, to power fusion reactors. Helium – 3 is a better fuel than deuterium. And you know the Earth-Moon system is almost barren of it.’
She nodded slowly.
He said, ‘And further out in time, on a bigger scale, you could start exporting Titan’s volatiles, to inner planets lacking them.’
‘What volatiles?’
‘Nitrogen,’ he said. ‘An Earth-like biosphere needs nitrogen. Mars has none; Titan has plenty.’ He looked at her closely. ‘Paula, are you following me? Titan nitrogen could be used to terraform Mars.’ He started talking more rapidly. ‘That’s why Titan is vital. We may have only one shot at this, with the technology we have available now. If we could establish some kind of beachhead on Titan, we could use it as a base, long-term, for the colonization of the rest of the System. If we don’t – hell, it might be centuries before we could assemble the resources for another shot. If ever. I’ve thought this through. I have an integrated plan, on how a colony on Titan could be used as a springboard to open up the outer System, over short, medium and long scales … I’ll give you a copy.’
‘Yeah.’ She was starting to feel bewildered. My God, she thought. We can’t even fly our handful of thirty-year-old spaceplanes. We’ve sent one cut-price bucket of bolts down into Titan’s atmosphere. And here is this guy, this hairy JPL wacko, talking about interplanetary commerce, terraforming the bodies of the Solar System.
Future
