Ben Bova - Titan

Or maybe not. Maybe, he thought, I have enough to last me the rest of my life.

“Link with the master program?” Gaeta asked.

He didn’t recognize Habib’s voice, but whoever it was that was speaking to him, the guy seemed to know what he was talking about.

“You’ve been briefed on connecting with the central computer,” Habib said, half questioning.

“Yeah, right,” Gaeta said. “But what about the uplink antenna? You want me to unload the nanos and build a new one for you?”

The twelve-second hesitation was getting on Gaeta’s nerves. You ask a question and then wait. I could get flattened by an asteroid before they come up with the frickin’ answer.

“No, not at this time. Keep the nanos bottled. We need to connect with the master program first.”

“Okay, amigo, I’m movin’ to the central computer port.”

Gaeta pulled the diagnostic probe out of the uplink antenna circuit and stuffed it back into the pouch at his waist. Instead of getting to his feet, he found it easier to crawl on his hands and knees from the front edge of Alpha ’s roof to its center. There was a panel built into the roof that opened to give access to the various computer ports. Sitting in an awkward sprawl, Gaeta leaned forward to open the panel and, checking with the information displays flickering against his visor, he located the central computer’s access port and fished his communications line from its pouch on the waist of his suit. He felt the connector’s end click into the access port.

Before he could say a syllable, a shrill electronic screech filled his helmet, piercing, so loud that Gaeta clapped his hands to the sides of the helmet in pain. Fumbling for the volume control inside his suit he turned down the volume on the earphones, but still the scream cut through his brain like a surgeon’s drill. Teeth gritted, he clamped his lips shut to stop the cry of agony that his body wanted to scream.

After several hours-long moments the shriek stopped. Gaeta was panting, sweating. It took him several more thumping heartbeats before he could gasp, “Is … is that what you wanted?”

He mentally counted the seconds until Habib replied excitedly, “Yes, yes, exactly right! You have accessed the master program.”

Great, he thought. Almost blew my frickin’ head off. Aloud, he asked, “Okay, now what?”

Again he waited while the ringing in his ears eased a little. “We need to analyze the program’s response. This is the first time the computer has responded to an input in more than three months.”

Lucky me, Gaeta said to himself. Squinting out beyond the edge of the rover’s roof, he saw that the clouds covering the sky were almost the color of chocolate: muddy, dismal, depressing. They bulged thickly overhead like the bellies of pregnant elephants. In the farthest distance a sheet of black was falling to the ground.

“How long is this gonna take?” he asked.

Habib finally answered, “Several hours, at least. Perhaps several days.”

“Days?” Gaeta screeched. “I’ve only got an hour down here. Less. Fifty-one minutes.”

Berkowitz was in the communications building’s broadcast studio monitoring Gaeta’s visual and audio transmissions from Titan’s surface. His smart wall screen displayed what Gaeta’s helmet cameras showed, and he had borrowed one of Urbain’s planetary scientists to give a running commentary on what Gaeta was experiencing. She had no other responsibilities as long as Alpha was not sending up sensor data, so she had jumped at the chance to be, as Berkowitz had dramatically put it, “the voice of mission control.”

Seated before the cameras at a tiny desk in front of a fake bookcase, she was commenting, “The ground is frozen, from the looks of it, and covered with a dark, slushy methane snow. The roundish boulders are made of water ice, not stone. Those shards sticking up out of the ground might be water ice, too. The weather is pretty normal for Titan: one hundred and ninety-two degrees below zero, with a thick overcast and a snowstorm of black, carbon-based tholins approaching the area.”

Snowstorm? Berkowitz’s ears perked up. Could that be dangerous? He turned to the keyboard on his desk and typed SNOW DANGER? The words immediately appeared on the flat screen built into the top of the commentator’s curved desk.

She glanced over at Berkowitz then, with a bit of a forced smile, turned back to the camera. “Tholin storms are commonplace on Titan. The flakes are black and they cut down on visibility quite a lot. Tholins are carbon-based particles, somewhat like plastics manufactured …”

Berkowitz stopped listening. The latest audience figures were scrolling across his wall screen’s data bar. He grinned widely. Between the audiences on Earth and on the Moon, he saw, we’ve already hit a billion. Money in the bank.

And, he thought, if Gaeta gets into some kind of trouble down there the ratings will go even higher.

Habib could hear the shocked surprise in Gaeta’s voice.

“Days? I’ve only got an hour down here. Less. Fifty-one minutes.”

“I know,” he said. “I understand.” His eyes were on the alphanumerics scrolling across his console screen. The master computer was communicating easily enough, but it was only general housekeeping information, not the data from the sensors that Urbain so desperately wanted.

The answer is somewhere in those symbols, Habib was certain. It’s got to be! But where? It will take days to scan through all of it, to find where the problem lay.

“Hey!” Gaeta snapped impatiently. “I don’t have more’n another fifty minutes before this suit starts to run dry. When that happens, I’ve got to leave.”

“Please be patient,” Habib replied, feeling annoyed. “We’ll start analyzing the program’s response right away.”

He looked around at the other consoles. His own trio of computer analysts was already huddled together, eagerly tracing the response from Alpha. Gaeta’s mission control technicians were clustered at a single console off in the corner of the control center. Strange that Urbain isn’t here, Habib thought. He must be following this from his office.

“Patience my butt,” Gaeta grumbled. “I’m not gonna die down here.”

“No, no, of course not,” Habib said mechanically. But he was thinking, Is there some way we can speed up the analysis? Some way to break through to the master program’s reason for shutting down the sensor uplink?

“We must determine why the data uplink was aborted,” he said, trying to explain the problem. “All of Alpha ’s systems seem to be functioning as designed and now we know that the uplink antenna is not physically damaged. The problem is with the central computer’s master program, I’m certain of it.”

Look for anomalies, Habib told himself even as he was speaking to Gaeta. He looked out at the other consoles; all their screens were filled with the central computer’s data flow. The control center buzzed with nervous energy now. The engineers had something to do, a task to accomplish, and they were all bending over their screens, searching for answers. Habib was certain that somewhere in the master program was a contradiction, a programming error. We’ve got to find it, he told himself.

The lean, spare man who was head of Gaeta’s team of technicians was walking purposively toward him. Von Helmholtz looked determined, humorless, like an inflexible schoolmaster or the martinet who commands a squad of elite commandos.

Gaeta’s voice came through the console’s speaker. “So why don’t you ask the fregado computer why it’s screwed up?”

Habib felt his brows shoot up. “What? What did you say?”

Before Gaeta had a chance to hear his question and reply, von Helmholtz leaned over Habib’s shoulder and said stiffly, “He has only forty-seven minutes to remain safely on the ground. After that we must extract him, bring him back to the transfer vessel.”