Ben Bova: Titan

Urbain heard champagne corks popping, the laughter and the raucous horseplay that comes when nerve-twisting tension is suddenly released. Although he felt the same joy and satisfaction, he had no desire to celebrate, no urge to behave foolishly. All he really wanted at this particular moment was to get to the urinal.

Wexler was not about to release him, though. She grasped his forearm with fleshless talonlike fingers, hard enough to make Urbain wince, and began to introduce him to the other Important Persons who had flown all the way out to Saturn for this momentous occasion.

She was hardly an imposing figure. Dr. Wexler looked hard, brittle, Urbain thought: a short, bony woman with an intense birdlike face and plain brown hair cut short, wearing a tailored tunic and deep blue slacks designed more to disguise her skeletal figure than to make a fashion statement. Yet she had power and the ruthlessness to wield it. Back on Earth she was often called “Attila the Honey.” Not to her face, of course.

Urbain himself was quite elegant. He had given a lot of thought to his wardrobe for this morning’s event, and—with his wife’s help and eventual approval—had selected a trim gray business suit with a soft Persian blue silk cravat.

Jeanmarie was in the crowd of onlookers, he knew. Searching for her, he finally saw her watching him, her eyes glowing with his success. She is beautiful, Urbain thought. Beautiful and happy, at last.

Thirty-seven university and news media VIPs had flown on a high-velocity fusion torch ship to this habitat in orbit around Saturn, courtesy of Pancho Lane and Astro Corporation. Normally, the men and women who directed the International Consortium of Universities preferred to remain on Earth and spend their money on research or teaching. Normally, news network executives sent their reporters afield while they remained in their opulent offices. But Pancho Lane was heading for habitat Goddard and had invited the ICU and the news media to send a contingent along with her, so here they were.

Urbain suffered through what seemed like an endless round of introductions. Wexler even introduced him to Professor Wilmot, who had been aboard Goddard from the outset as its chief administrator—living and working with Urbain for nearly three years now.

“Good show today, Eduoard,” said Wilmot jovially, as they clasped hands while Wexler beamed approvingly. “Hope everything goes this well tomorrow.”

Tomorrow, Urbain thought. Christmas day. When they begin to turn on Titan Alpha ’s sensors and start the exploration of Titan’s surface.

“Have some champagne, Eduoard.” Wilmot proffered his own untouched plastic cup. “You’ve earned it.”

“Er, not just yet, thank you,” Urbain replied. “There is something I must do first.”

The successful landing of Titan Alpha on the cloud-shrouded surface of Saturn’s largest moon was not the only startling event aboard habitat Goddard. A day earlier, Pancho Lane had provided fireworks of a different sort.

Although she had officially retired as CEO of Astro Corporation, Pancho still had enough clout to commandeer the fusion torch ship Starpower III for a six-week flight to distant Saturn. And to bring a gaggle of ICU bigwigs and news executives with her, as well as her personal bodyguard and lover.

Pancho made her way up Starpower III ’s paneled central passageway toward the bridge to watch the torch ship’s approach to Goddard through the bridge’s glassteel ports. Once an astronaut herself, she had no patience with sitting in her compartment and staring at a video display of the approach and docking. Nor was she in a mood to mingle with the passengers in the central lounge: flatlanders, most of them. Earthworms who had never been farther than the comfortable cities on the Moon and only traveled deeper into space in the luxury and safety of this commodious torch ship.

If the ship’s captain or crew members felt uncomfortable with the retired head of the corporation poking around their bridge, they did their best to hide it. Pancho sat at the vacated life support console, where she could gaze through the bridge’s sweeping windows of heavily tinted glassteel as Starpower III neared Goddard ’s main docking port.

It took an effort to keep her eyes off Saturn. The planet bulked huge and looming, nearly ten times bigger than Earth, striped with soft tan and muted yellow clouds whipping along at hyperhurricane velocities. White clouds circled the pole. Or was that an aurora? Pancho wondered. It’s summertime down there in the southern hemisphere, she thought. Temperature’s prob’ly gettin’ close to a hundred and fifty below zero. They must be clouds, ice formations.

The rings were tipped so that Pancho could see them in all their dazzling complexity, glittering, glistening broad bands of gleaming ice chunks hanging in emptiness, stupendous rings many thousands of kilometers across, yet so thin that the stars shone through them. This close, Pancho could see that the rings were braided, countless individual rings woven together like a rich circular tapestry made of brilliant diamonds. Some of the scientists claimed that there were living creatures in those ice particles, extremophiles that thrived at temperatures near absolute zero.

Compared to gaudy Saturn and those radiant rings, the man-made Goddard was not much to look at, Pancho thought, as she watched the massive habitat growing larger. It was a thick, ungainly cylinder, twenty kilometers long and four across, rotating slowly to produce an artificial gravity for the ten thousand men and women living inside it. It reminded Pancho of a stubby length of storm drainpipe hanging in the emptiness, although as they neared it she could see that its surface was pebbled with observation bubbles, docking ports, antennas and other projections studding the cylinder’s curving flank. And at about two-thirds of the way along the cylinder stood the ring of solar mirrors standing like a collar of flower petals, drinking in sunlight for the habitat’s farms and electrical power and life support.

Susie’s in there, Pancho thought. Then she remembered: Mustn’t call her Susie anymore. She changed her name to Holly. And it damned near killed her.

Despite her best intentions Pancho couldn’t help feeling a simmer of resentment about her sister. Sooze was only three years younger than Pancho, as far as calendar age was concerned. But while Pancho had allowed her hair to go stark white and was taking rejuvenation therapies to stave off the encroachment of age, Susan was physically no more than thirty. And mentally, emotionally—Pancho grimaced at the thought.

Susan had died while she was a teenager. Pancho had administered the lethal injection herself, once the medical experts had woefully assured her that there was no hope of saving Susan from the drug-induced cancer that was ruining her body. So Pancho pushed the hypodermic syringe into her sister’s emaciated arm and watched her die. As soon as she was pronounced clinically dead the medics slid her body into a heavy stainless steel sarcophagus, a coffin-sized dewar that they filled with liquid nitrogen, steaming white, deadly cold.

For more than twenty years Pancho guarded Susie’s cryonically preserved body as she herself climbed the corporate ladder of power from hell-raising astronaut to CEO and board chairman of Astro Corporation. Pancho directed Astro’s side of the Second Asteroid War, and once that tragedy ground to its exhausted, blood-soaked finish, she had formally retired from Astro to start a new life of—what? she asked herself. What am I doing here, all the way the hell out at Saturn. What am I going to do with the rest of my life?