Ben Bova: Titan

Then she saw him, standing by himself off in the corner where the stage met the auditorium’s side wall. Squaring her shoulders like a soldier heading into battle, she pushed through the crowd at the bar and went toward her target.

Da’ud Habib was chief of the computer group. He didn’t look like the other computer geeks, scruffy and rumpled. He was wearing a crisply pressed red sport shirt over his slacks. Sandals, though, and no socks. Actually he was almost kind of handsome, Wunderly thought. He kept the dark little beard that fringed his jaw neat and trim. His eyes were a deep liquid brown. But he was pretty much of a loner, a quiet guy. His ancestry was Arabic, she knew. She had looked up his dossier: he’d been born and raised in Vancouver, in a Moslem neighborhood, but he was more Canadian than anything else. At least, she hoped so.

“Hi,” she said, as soon as she was close enough.

He looked a little surprised. “Hello.”

“I’m Nadia Wunderly.”

“I know. You found the creatures in the rings.”

Nadia smiled her best. “That’s me. Lord of the rings, they call me.”

He smiled back uncertainly. “Er, shouldn’t it be ‘lady of the rings’?”

“Literary license.”

“Ah. I see.”

“Is it okay to wish you a Merry Christmas?”

“Of course. I’m not anti-Christian. I’ve always enjoyed the Christmas season; the shopping, the music, all that.”

Wunderly took a sip of her water. Habib was drinking something that looked fizzy to her. Probably nonalcoholic, she thought.

“You’re Da’ud Habib, aren’t you?”

“Oh! I should have introduced myself. I’m sorry.”

“No problem. You’re chief of the computing group, right?”

“Lord of the nerds, yes.”

She laughed and he laughed with her.

“Big day tomorrow,” she said, trying to figure out how to turn the conversation into the path she wanted.

Habib nodded again. “Urbain’s Christmas present to himself.”

She took a breath and plunged ahead. “The New Year’s Eve party is a week from tonight.”

“Oh? Yes, I suppose so.”

“Are you going?”

He looked almost alarmed by her question. He actually backed away from her a step. “Me? I … I hadn’t thought about it.”

Wunderly could hear her pulse thumping in her ears. Stepping closer to Habib, she asked, “Would you like to go with me? I mean, I don’t have a date for the party and I thought we could go together.”

His brow wrinkled slightly and she held her breath.

“Go with you?” It seemed like a totally new idea to him, something he would never have thought of by himself.

Don’t make me beg, she pleaded silently.

He seemed to understand, or maybe see it in her eyes. “Why, yes, I suppose so. I wasn’t planning on going …” He brightened slowly and smiled again, wider this time. “But why not? I’d be happy to go with you.”

Wunderly wanted to laugh with delight, but she reined herself in and said merely, “Great! Then it’s a date.”

Christmas morning, but no one on the scientific staff was taking a holiday. Not yet. The mission control center was never meant to hold so many people, Urbain thought nervously, as he stood sandwiched between Dr. Wexler and Professor Wilmot. The morning shift of technicians had to worm their way through the crowd to get to their consoles. Packed in behind the last row of the consoles, the university notables and news executives stood shoulder to shoulder, making the chamber hot, sweaty with the press of their bodies. Their murmured conversations sounded like the drone of insects on a summer day from Urbain’s childhood in Quebec.

He felt as edgy as a twitching rabbit, especially with Wexler standing beside him and some three dozen other guests squeezed into the control center. Even the redoubtable Pancho Lane, the newly retired industrialist, had flown out to Saturn for this momentous event. The only lights in the circular chamber came from the screens on the control staff’s consoles. Urbain looked up at their flickering reflections on the dark, blank wall screen to see Professor Wilmot, smiling expectantly beside him.

“The first data from your surface probe,” said Wexler, beaming at him. “This is a memorable Christmas for science, Eduoard.”

Urbain nodded tightly. He was a short, wiry man, the kind who never worried about his weight because everything he ate turned into nervous energy. His dark hair was slicked straight back from his high forehead, his beard was neatly trimmed. As he had yesterday, he wore his best suit for this moment; after all, half the people crammed into the control center were from the news media.

The high and mighty of the International Consortium of Universities had not always smiled upon Eduoard Urbain. When this expedition to Saturn had started nearly three years earlier, Urbain was regarded as a second-rater, a competent worker but no blazing star. He was chosen to head the scientific staff that rode the immense habitat Goddard out to Saturn to take up a polar orbit about the ringed planet because Urbain and his team were regarded merely as caretakers, meant only to make routine observations and babysit the scientific equipment during Goddard ’s slow, two-year voyage out to Saturn. Once the habitat was safely in orbit there, the world’s top planetary scientists would dash out on a fusion torch ship to take up the tasks of investigating Saturn and, more important, its giant moon, Titan.

As far as Urbain was concerned, however, the ten thousand men and women who made up Goddard ’s self-contained community existed solely to service the handful of scientists and engineers under his authority. Urbain spent almost every waking moment of those two years driving his engineering staff to build Titan Alpha —his dream, the offspring of his mind, the product of his lifelong hope. Part spacecraft, part armored tractor, Titan Alpha was meant to carry the most sophisticated sensors and computers conceivable to the surface of Titan and use them to explore that frigid, smog-shrouded world under real-time control from scientists in Goddard .

Even as he built the massive exploratory vehicle, Urbain knew in his heart that other, more prominent scientists would be the ones to use it, to guide it across Titan’s fields of ice, to gain glory and recognition out of his sweat and toil. An accident changed all that, one of those accidents that dot the history of scientific research. Nadia Wunderly, one of Urbain’s lowly assistants and a stubborn woman at best, insisted on studying Saturn’s rings. The rest of his scientific team was focused exclusively on Titan, for that massive moon was known to bear life, microscopic organisms that lived in the petrochemical soup that covered part of Titan’s icy surface.

Wunderly discovered what might have been a new form of living organism dwelling in Saturn’s rings. As her director, Urbain received much of the credit for this revelation. And, perversely, won the right to direct Titan Alpha in its exploration of the giant moon’s surface.

Now he basked in the attention of the solar system’s most important scientists as his creation, his offspring, his dream come true— Titan Alpha—began to send data from its sensors on the frozen surface of Titan.

Urbain held his breath. The jam-packed control center went eerily silent.

The wall screen lit up to show: SYSTEMS ACTIVATION.

Deep inside Titan Alpha ’s armored hide, its central computer began to receive commands through its downlink antenna.

Command: Systems activation.

Communications downlink confirmed. Code accepted. Systems activation procedures initiated.