Ben Bova - Titan

Standing behind the seated woman, he bent over her shoulder and stared at the display screen: nothing more than a mottled sphere of dull orange. “Where is the infrared view?” he demanded impatiently.

The young woman held up a finger as she muttered into her mike. The sphere on the screen abruptly changed. The clouds disappeared and Urbain could see the bright glints of Titan’s rolling, hilly ground and the dark shapes of its seas. One looked like the head of a dragon, another somewhat like a child’s drawing of a dog. Then there was the H-shaped one, where Titan Alpha had landed.

“Magnification,” he snapped.

The view zoomed in. The H shape of the methane sea was oriented east-west, rather than standing up as the letter is made in actual writing. Nearly a century earlier the Americans, with their usual cowboy attitude, had dubbed it the Lazy H Sea.

“That’s the best magnification we can get,” said the scientist.

Urbain could not see his lander. We need satellites in lower orbits, he told himself. An entire fleet of them so that Titan Alpha is under constant surveillance.

“So?” he insisted. “Where is this laser flash?”

“I’m running it back—there! Didja see it? I’ll run it forward again.”

Urbain saw the briefest of glints on the edge of the methane sea. He straightened up, disappointed. “It might have been a sparkle in the electronics. A bad pixel.”

The young woman shook her head stubbornly. “No, I checked its duration and it’s consistent with a laser pulse. Just a small squirt, no more than ten kilojoules. Ran the light through a spectral analysis, too, and it’s water and methane and the other carbon gunk from the sea.”

Urbain stared down at her. “Titan Alpha actually fired its laser?”

“Yes, sir, it surely did.”

One of the engineers said, “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you, Dr. Urbain. We’re still getting telemetry from the lander. It’s sending up continuous data on its internal condition. Everything’s working fine.”

“But it will not uplink data from its sensors.”

“That’s the one glitch,” the engineer admitted.

Urbain glared at him. “This glitch, as you put it, makes Titan Alpha useless, pointless, stupid.”

Returning his glare without blinking, the engineer insisted, “I think it’s the central computer. Some kind of error in the programming. Everything is fine in the lander except for the data uplink. For some reason it’s not sending data back to us. The sensors seem to be working as designed, but the vehicle isn’t uplinking the data it’s collecting. It’s got to be a computer glitch.”

“In other words,” Urbain said coldly, “you are telling me that the patient is in fine condition, except that she is catatonic.”

Kris Cardenas could see the tremendous strain that Urbain was under. As the only Nobel laureate in the habitat, she had invited Dr. Wexler, Pancho, Urbain and his wife to a small farewell dinner at Nemo’s restaurant, the swankiest eatery aboard Goddard.

Nemo’s was decorated to look like the mock-Victorian interior of Jules Verne’s fictional Nautilus : Brass bulkheads and thick pipes running overhead. Display screens shaped like portholes showed teeming schools of fish, slithering octopuses, sleek deadly sharks.

Manny Gaeta looked uncomfortable in a maroon turtleneck shirt and ivory cardigan jacket, as close as he would come to formal dinner wear. Cardenas wore a flowered short-skirted frock, Wexler a dark blue finger-length tunic over a midcalf skirt. Pancho was in a comfortable pantsuit of hunter green, while Jeanmarie Urbain had decked herself in a clinging black sheath decorated with intricate embroidery that showed her trim figure to excellent advantage.

“I had hoped that this would be a celebration,” Cardenas said, trying to make her tone light, cheerful, “with champagne and congratulations. I guess that will have to wait for a while.”

Urbain opened his mouth to respond, then simply shook his head and reached for the glass of fruit juice in front of him.

“The celebration will come,” said Wexler, forcing a smile. “It’s too bad I won’t be here when the probe finally starts sending up data.”

“You leave tomorrow?” asked Jeanmarie. “So soon?”

“Ms. Lane’s craft departs tomorrow and there won’t be another ship out here for many months,” Wexler replied.

“I could hold it here for a coupla more days,” Pancho said. “But the bean counters back at Astro Corporation’s headquarters would get twitchy.”

“Tell ’em to twitch,” Gaeta gruffed.

Pancho grinned at him. “If I was still CEO I could and I would. With me retired, though, they’re doin’ me a favor as it is.”

“I couldn’t stay a few more days in any event,” said Wexler, glancing at Urbain and then swiftly back to Pancho. “I’ve got work piling up back home.”

“You think you’ll be able to fix the glitch in a few days?” Pancho asked Urbain.

He forced a sickly smile. “Perhaps.”

“It should take not much longer than that,” Jeanmarie said, quite firmly. “After all, they know the machine is working. Its internal systems are functioning. The only problem is the communications link, is it not?”

Urbain nodded morosely.

A human waiter came to the table hesitantly, holding large leather-covered menus. Cardenas nodded to him. Better to have them reading the menu and ordering their dinners than moping over the probe’s silence, she thought.

Although she was the oldest person at the table, Kris Cardenas looked like a vibrant outdoorsy woman in her thirties, thanks to the nanomachines that coursed through her body like a purposeful, almost intelligent immune system that destroyed invading microbes, cleared blood vessels of plaque, repaired damaged tissues. She had the broad shoulders and bright blonde hair of a California surfer, and cornflower blue eyes that sparkled in the candlelight of the dinner table. Exiled from Earth because of the nanos inside her, she had lost her husband, her children, had never touched the faces of her grandchildren. She had spent years in bitter hatred of the know-nothings on Earth who had totally banned nanotechnology, then more years of repentance as a medic for the rock rats of the Asteroid Belt at Ceres.

Now she was beginning a new life aboard this habitat orbiting Saturn, with handsome, hunky Manuel Gaeta, who had retired from his career as a stuntman to be with her.

As their appetizers were being placed on the table before them, Gaeta asked Urbain, “Do you have any idea why the beast won’t talk to you?”

Urbain, sitting across the table from Gaeta, raised his brows as he tried to interpret the man’s question. Finally he frowned slightly and said, “We are working on several possibilities. It is very puzzling.”

Wexler laid a clawlike hand on Urbain’s sleeve. “It’s always very puzzling, Eduoard, until you get the answer. Then you wonder why it puzzled you for so long.”

“I’m sure Eduoard will come up with the correct answer in a day or so,” said Jeanmarie.

Her husband scowled at her.

“You remember the first time we met?” Gaeta asked him. “In Professor Wilmot’s office?”

Urbain nodded warily.

A crooked grin broke out on Gaeta’s rugged face. “I wanted to go down to the surface of Titan. Be the first human being to set foot on the place. I thought you’d have a stroke!”

Smiling weakly, Urbain said, “We cannot have humans on Titan. The contamination …” He let his voice fade away.

“I agree,” said Wexler sharply. “There are unique life-forms down there. It would be criminal to contaminate them with terrestrial organisms.”