Arthur Clarke - Imperial Earth

“First of all, it’s the only place, outside the Earth, where a man can move around on the surface without a full spacesuit. That may surprise you, after what I’ve just said about the conditions there! I don’t deny that we need protection, but it’s much less than required on the Moon, or even on Mars. The atmosphere is so dense it allows us to breathe with simple oxygen masks, though we have to be extremely careful to avoid any leaks. If you’ve ever smelled ammonia, you’ll know why. And lightweight thermosuits can cope with the temperature, except in very bad weather.”

“Having an atmosphere—even a poisonous one!—makes life easier in dozens of ways. It means that we can use aircraft for long-distance transportation. It protects us from meteorites—not that there are many out there—and from the temperature extremes that a completely airless world would have. And, most important of all—we’ve got an atmosphere we can burn, and use as a source of energy.”

“It’s just the opposite of the way things are here on Earth. Here, you burn hydrogen compounds, and the atmosphere supplies the oxygen. On Titan, we have to provide the oxygen, and we burn that in the hydrogen atmosphere. But the final result is the same—heat and energy, to warm ourselves and drive our vehicles.”

“That hydrogen-rich atmosphere is Titan’s greatest asset, and the reason men settled there in the first place. For without hydrogen, our spaceships cannot operate. Our chemical rockets burn it, and our fusion rockets—er—fuse it. Hydrogen is the key to the Solar System.”

“And there are only two places where it’s easily obtainable. One is right here—in the oceans of Earth. But it’s expensive, lifting it out into space against the huge gravity field of your world—the one that’s keeping me pinned to this chair right now.”

Duncan paused hopefully, and got a few encouraging smiles.

“The other place is Titan. It’s a filling station, if you like, halfway to the stars. And because of it’s low gravity, we can export hydrogen cheaply, to anywhere in the Solar System, using robot tankers carrying up to ten thousand tons. Without us, space travel would be at least four times as expensive as it is now, and interplanetary commerce would be crippled.”

“And how we get that hydrogen is interesting. We’ve been called ‘sky miners’ because of the way we take it out of the atmosphere. Specialized aircraft—‘transcoops’—fly at high altitude and ever-increasing velocity, collecting hydrogen and liquefying it, then jumping up to orbit when they have a full load. There they rendezvous with the space tankers, deliver the goods, and they go back into the atmosphere for more. They stay up for weeks on end, and land only when it’s time for servicing, or a change of crew.”

Better not overdo the technicalities, Duncan told himself. It was a pity, but he’d be wise to omit the most dramatic part of the whole operation—the fall down to Saturn after the robot tanker had escaped from Titan, and the hairpin loop around the giant planet taking advantage of its gravitational field to launch the precious payload to the customer who was waiting one or two years in the future. And he certainly couldn’t do justice to the most spectacular trip in the Solar System—the Saturn sleighride, as it had been aptly christened by one of the few men who had raced across the thousands of kilometers of spinning ice that formed the rings.

Duncan bravely resisted these temptations. He had best stick to history and politics—even though, in this case, both were largely by-products of technology.

“One could make a very interesting comparison,” he continued, “between the settlement of Titan and the opening up of this continent, three or four hundred years earlier. I’m sure it took the same kind of pioneering spirit, and in our case we’re lucky because we have films and tapes and cassettes of the whole period. More than that—some of our pioneers are still around, ready to reminisce at the drop of a hat. In fact, quicker than that, because hats drop slowly on Titan...”

That was rather neat, Duncan told himself, though it was undoubtedly inspired by the view in front of him. Why did they wear the damn things indoors? Obviously, they were trying to outdo each other. Most of these creations were not merely useless; they looked as if they would take off in the slightest wind.

A flicker of movement caught Duncan’s eye. I don’t believe it, he thought. Then he stole another quick glance, hoping his interest would be unobserved.

Either he had taken leave of his senses, which was an acceptable working hypothesis, or there was a live fish swimming around in the third row. It was orbiting in a tiny crystal globe, surrounded by a tasteful display of corals and seashells, on the head of an intense, middle-aged lady who, unluckily, was staring straight at him with popeyed concentration.

Duncan gulped, gave a sickly smile, and stumbled on. He tried to push to the back of his mind the baffling problem of the fish’s life-support system. If he stopped to worry about that, he would be tripping over his tongue in no time at all. Where was he? OH, back with the pioneers, difficult though it was to focus on them in this lavishly decorated and slightly overheated room.

“I’m sure many of you have read Professor Prescott’s famous book With Axe and Laser: A Study of Two Frontiers . Though he draws his parallels between America and Mercury, everything that he says is also applicable to Titan.”

“As I recall, Prescott argues that Man’s conquest of the wilderness on this planet was based on three things: the axe, the plow, and fire. He uses these symbolically rather than literally; the axe stands for all tools, the plow for agriculture, and fire for all forms of power generation.”

“The axe cut down the forests, shaped homes and furniture. More refined tools manufactured all the other necessities of civilized living, from cups and saucers to aircraft and computers.”

“The axe wasn’t much use on the Moon, or Mercury—or Titan. What took its place was the power laser. That was the tool that carved out our homes and, later, cities. And it opened up the mineral resources, buried kilometers down in the rocks.”

“Of course, we were luckier than the old pioneers, because we did not have to spend endless man-hours making every single object that we needed. All the artifacts of civilization were already stored in the memories of our replicators. As long as we fed in the raw materials, anything we needed—no matter how complex—would be produced automatically in a matter of seconds, and in any quantity we needed. I know we take the replicator for granted, but it would have seemed like magic to our ancestors.”

“As for the plow, that too had no place on our world. But by the twenty-second century, it had no place on yours either; we simply took your food technology to the planets. And on Titan, it was easy, much easier than anywhere else in the Solar System. We have enormous deposits of hydrocarbons—waxes, oils, and so forth. Who knows—perhaps one day we may be feeding Earth!”

“Finally, the third item—fire. Occasionally, we still use it, though, as I explained, we have to provide the oxygen. But, again as on Earth, we get all the power we need for nuclear fusion. We’re already heating large areas of Titan and are thinking about major changes to its climate. But as some of these may be irreversible, we’re proceeding very cautiously. We don’t want to repeat the mistakes that have been made—elsewhere.”

Duncan nearly said “on Earth,” but tactfully changed gear just in time. He did a swift scan of the audience, carefully avoiding the fish in the third row. The ladies still seemed to be with him, though one or two hats were nodding suspiciously.