don’t you think we ought to take this one step at a time? If we’re going to fly to other worlds, wouldn’t it be smarter to go somewhere closer to home? The Moon, even Mars?’
‘The old Tsiolkovsky plan,’ he said dismissively. ‘The von Braun scheme. Expand in an orderly way, one step at a time. But hasn’t the history of the last half-century taught us that it just won’t be like that? Paula, the Solar System is a big, empty, hostile place. You can’t envisage an orderly, progressive expansion out there; it will be more like the colonization of Polynesia – fragile ships, limping across the ocean to remote islands. And when you find somewhere friendly, you stop, colonize, and use it as a base to move on. Titan is about the friendliest island we can see; it’s resource-rich, with a shallow gravity well, and it’s a hell of a long way out from the sun. And that’s not all.’
‘What else?’
‘Paula, we think we’ve found life down there.’
‘I know. I read the World Weekly News.’
He looked offended. ‘It wasn’t World Weekly News. And it was your daughter’s report … Anyhow, this changes everything. Don’t you see? Titan is the future: not just for us, the space program, but for life itself in the Solar System.’
She looked, sideways, at his thin face, the orange light of Titan reflecting from his glasses. He didn’t look as if anybody had held him, close, maybe since his early teenage years. And here he was, trying to reach out across a billion miles, to putative beings in some murky puddle on another world.
She’d seen people like this before, on the fringes of the space program. Mostly lonely men. Rosenberg was dreaming of an impossible future. She wondered what it was inside of him he was trying to heal by doing this.
She felt sorry for him.
‘Let me get this straight,’ she said. ‘You want me to back a proposal to send another mission to Titan. Is that right? More probes – maybe some kind of sample return?’
He was shaking his head. She sensed that this situation was about to get worse.
‘No. You haven’t been listening. Not another probe. People,’ he said. ‘We have to send a crewed mission to Titan. We have to send people there.’ He turned in his seat and faced her, deadly serious.
‘Rosenberg, if I’d known you were going to propose something like this –’
‘I know.’ He grinned, and suddenly his looks were boyish. ‘You wouldn’t have flown out. That’s why I didn’t tell you. But I’m not crazy, and I don’t want to waste your time. Just listen.’
‘We don’t have the technology,’ she said. ‘We probably never will.’
‘But we do have the technology. What the hell else are you going to do with your grounded Shuttle fleet?’
‘You want to use Shuttle hardware to reach Titan? Rosenberg, it’s crazy even to think of going to Saturn with chemical rockets. It would take years –’
‘Actually, getting there is easy. So is surviving on the surface. The hard part is coming home …’
At a console, Rosenberg started showing her the preliminary delta-vee and propellant mass calculations he’d made; he was talking too quickly, and she tried to pay attention, following his argument.
She listened.
It was, of course, crazy.
But …
She found herself grinning. Sending people to Titan, huh?
Well, working on a proposal like this, if it could be made to hang together at all, would be a hell of a lot more fun than trawling around the crash inquiries and consultancy circuit forever. It would put bugs up a lot of asses. Including, she thought wickedly, Jackie’s.
In a satisfying way, in fact, her own involvement in this craziness was all Jackie’s fault.
And, what if it all resulted in something tangible? A Titan adventure would be a peg for a lot of young imaginations, in a future which was looking enclosing and bleak. JPL might be finished. So might the Shuttle program, all of America’s first space efforts. But maybe, out of their ashes, some kind of marker to a better future could be drawn.
Or maybe she just wanted to get back at Jackie.
She had a couple of hours before the flight back to Houston. She could afford to indulge Rosenberg a little more.
It would be a thought experiment. It might make a neat little paper for the Journal of Spacecraft and Rockets. Or maybe one of the sci-fi magazines.
She sat down and started to go through Rosenberg’s back-of-the-envelope numbers more carefully, trying to find the mistake that had to be in there, the hole that would make the whole thing fall apart, the reason why it was impossible to send people to Titan.
Nicola Mott did not want to go home.
She and Siobhan Libet, her sole crewmate on Station, had spent the last day packing the Soyuz reentry module as best they could with results from their work – biological and medical samples, data cassettes and diskettes, film cartridges, notebooks and softscreens. Then Libet dimmed the floods in the Service Module, the Station’s main component, and pulled out her sleeping bag.
But Mott didn’t want to sleep. She wanted to spin out these last few hours as much as she could.
So, alone, she made her way through the open hatch and down to the end of the FGB module, the Russian-built energy block docked on the end of the Service Module.
She stared out the window at the shining, wrinkled surface of the Pacific.
The shadows of the light, high clouds on the water grew longer, and the Station passed abruptly into night. She huddled by the window, curling up into a foetal ball. She could see the lights of a ship, crawling across the skin of the darkened ocean.
She – Nicola Mott, English-born astronaut – might be the last Westerner ever to see such sights, she thought.
She was too young to remember Apollo, barely old enough to remember Skylab and ASTP. She’d been eleven, in the middle of an English spring, when Columbia made her maiden flight, and it had been a hell of a thrill. But after a while she started to wonder why these beautiful spaceships kept on flying up to orbit and coming back down without ever going anywhere.
And when she’d come to understand that, she started to realize that she’d been born at the wrong time: born too late to witness, still less participate in, Apollo; born too early, probably, to witness whatever came next.
Still, she’d decided to make her own way. She’d moved to America and worked through a short career at McDonnell Douglas, where she’d worked on the design and construction of a component of Station called the Integrated Truss Segment So, a piece that now looked as if it would never be shipped out of the McDonnell plant at Huntingdon Beach. She’d enjoyed her time at Huntingdon, looking back; the Balsa Avenue assembly area had the air of an ordinary industrial plant, no fancy NASA-style airlocks or clean rooms …
Anyhow,
