Titan (48 page)

But, she thought, there was no life here, not even—as far as anyone could tell—on that slush ball Europa. There was no life for a half-billion miles in any direction, save within the battered walls of this spacecraft, the bubble of air which sheltered her.

Damn it all. She wished Siobhan could see this. That remote death, back in the heart of the Solar System, was losing its power to hurt her now. But still, what a waste, what a meaningless, cruel waste.

No, I want to go to the hedgerow museum in Hampshire. Apparently they still have some ptarmigans there, the last ones. Oh, I have to tell you, you wouldn’t believe the price of potatoes in the shops. All the sweetcorn you could ask for, but it’s not the same… We know you are still missing Siobhan, love. We know you two were pals. You take care of yourself, and try not to fret about it all too much…

Pals. Her parents had never known—or had preferred not to know—about Libet’s true relationship with their daughter. Her parents had been young in the 1970s, hardly the Victorian era. Mott wondered if there was something in the human genome which dictated that no generation could accept the sexuality of its offspring.

But, out here, it hardly seemed to matter, like so much else.

Discovery
’s path—whirling around the inner planets, and then out past Jupiter to Saturn—was actually similar to that of
Cassini,
which had come this way more than a decade before. But since then Jupiter and Saturn had wheeled through their grand orbits, of twelve and twenty-nine years, and they weren’t in such a favorable position for
Discovery
’s slingshot as they had been for
Cassini. Discovery
needed to come in a lot closer than
Cassini,
to extract still more energy from Jupiter, the most massive planet in the Solar System.

But that meant the orbiter had to penetrate deep into Jupiter’s magnetosphere.

Mott knew she, and the rest of the crew, were paying a price. Jupiter’s magnetic field was ten times as powerful as Earth’s, and its magnetosphere—the doughnut-shaped belt of magnetically trapped solar wind particles—stretched fifty Jupiter diameters, far beyond
Discovery’s
current position. Right now heavy solar wind particles, electrons and hydrogen and helium nuclei, which circled, trapped, in Jupiter’s magnetosphere—ten thousand times as energetic as those in the Van Allen belts of Earth—coursed through the fabric of the ship, and her body.

Arguably this place, the magnetosphere of the most massive planet, was the most hostile section of deep space in the Solar System. And here she was, staring out the window at it.

Mott stayed on the flight deck as long as she could, exercising in Jupiter light.

She slowed her pace on the treadmill. She hung onto the pilot’s seat for a moment and let her aching legs drift, deliciously, in the balm of microgravity, bearing no weight at all. Then she swiveled and pulled herself to the instrument panel at the back of the flight deck, and looked out over the orbiter’s instrument bay.

Discovery
was passing Jupiter with its payload bay turned up to the giant planet and its system, instruments straining, the big high-gain antenna pointing at remote Earth, lost now in the glare of the sun. The point-source sun and pink Jupiter, at right angles to each other, cast complex multiple shadows over the blocky, blanketed equipment in the payload bay, and over
Discovery’s
curving wings.

It was impossible to reconcile the awesome spectacle up here with the squalor and crap of their lives inside the space-craft—the shitty, failing systems, the endless slog of their daily lives.

But there had been no other way to get here, to see this.

She toweled off her sweat, wrapped up her softscreen, and went back to the hab module.

Rosenberg clambered into Apollo Command Module CM-115, through the tight little docking tunnel in its nose, past the compartments containing the drogue and recovery parachutes and their mortars and the forward reaction control system.

He came down into the big pressurized crew compartment in the mid-section, descending on it from above. There were three couches in there, side by side on their backs. They were just metal frames slung with gray Armalon fiberglass cloth, so close together he was sure it wouldn’t be possible for three adult humans to pack in there without rubbing shoulders, elbows and knees against each other.

Rosenberg wriggled into the center couch, the Command Module Pilot’s. He spread out his manuals on his knee.

He was here as part of his in-flight training program. He was never going to be a pilot, but he had to learn how to fly an Apollo—in case of contingency—all the way to the surface of Titan.

The Command Module was like a small aircraft, upended, its interior coated with switches, dials and cathode ray displays. The lights were subdued, the glow in the cabin greenish from the CRTs. Directly in front of him there was a big, gun-metal gray, one-hundred-and-eighty-degree instrument panel, glistening with five hundred switches. There were control handles on the commander’s couch armrests: the attitude controller assembly on the right, which was used to control the reaction thruster assemblies, and the big thrust-translator controller on the left, which could be used to accelerate the craft forward or back. For this unique mission, the attitude control would also be used to direct a paraglider, a shaped parachute which would guide Apollo down to a safe landing on Titan’s slushy surface.

There was a smell of plastic and metal; all around him the fans and pumps of the Command Module clicked and whirred.

The windows seemed small and far away; he was pretty much surrounded by metal walls, here, and even though the side hatch was still open, he felt closed in.

The Command Module showed Apollo’s priorities: it had been built to keep people alive, not to let them sightsee, or do any of that fancy science crap en route to the Moon.

He turned his attention to the instrument panel.

There were toggle switches, thumb wheels, push buttons, rotary switches with click stops. The readouts were mainly meters, lights and little rectangular windows. There were tiny joysticks and pushbuttons: translational controllers, to work the Command Module’s clusters of attitude rockets. He experimented with the switches. They were protected by little metal gates on either side, to save them being kicked by a free-fall boot. He worked his way across the panel, practicing flipping the dead switches, getting used to the feel of them.

There were little diagrams etched into the panel, he saw, circuit and flow charts. He consulted his manuals. All the switches were contained by one diagram or another. Once he started to see the system behind the diagrams, he began to figure the logic in the panel, how the switches clustered and related to each other.

He surveyed the cabin, checking he understood the contents of the lockers.

The equipment bay beyond the left-hand couch contained components of the environment control system, including the control unit. The bay in front of this held more life support equipment such as a water delivery system, and doubled as a clothing store. The right-hand bay contained more food, and the extremely clunky Apollo-era waste management systems: plastic condoms, and bags within which you had to catch and treat your turds. In a bay ahead of this Rosenberg found medical kits, survival gear and modern-looking camera equipment. In the aft bay, beneath the couches, were components of pressure suits.

If you docked with a Lunar Module, Rosenberg learned, you stowed your docking probe in that aft bay, and the circular tunnel cover in the left-hand bay…

In the lower bay at the foot of the center couch he found guidance and navigation electronics. Communications equipment was also crammed in there, along with batteries, food and other equipment.

There was also a tiny, beautiful sextant and telescope, for navigating between Earth and Moon.

CM-115 had been built four decades earlier, to fly to the Moon. But now it had been rebuilt, to some extent. CM-115 had been upgraded to stand a space soak of six years. Its attitude control system was to be based on nitrogen, which would not degrade in space. Hydraulic systems, which might freeze, were replaced by systems of wires and electric motors. The cooling system had been replaced by a water-based design, because chemicals in the old system like glycol were corrosive and couldn’t be stored over long periods. A thermal blanket cocoon had been fitted over the Command Module’s heatshield, to protect it from micrometeorite damage. The life support systems—some of which dated back to the Mercury era—had been upgraded to Shuttle technology. And so on.

The main challenge, in learning to handle this thing, was going to be the computer system.

Rosenberg spread a softscreen over his knee, opened up a manual, and began to poke at the Command Module’s DSKY—pronounced “disky”—the little computer touch-control pad. The technicians had torn the heart out of Apollo’s computers, but had to leave the same interface. Anything else would have meant pulling the ship apart, and nobody had the confidence to do that.

The DSKY was not a softscreen—not even much like the keyboard, mouse and monitor technology he had grown up with. There was just a block of status and warning lights labeled
PROG
and
OPR ERR
and
UPLINK ACTY
and
COMP ACTY
… He began to study their meanings.

Tentatively, he started to punch the keypad. The pad wasn’t even qwerty; it contained a blocky numeric pad, with addition and subtraction signs, and eight function keys with tiny lettering: VERB, NOUN, ENTER, RSET, PRO, others. The keypad was used to construct little command sentences, to communicate with the computer. There were about a hundred verbs and nouns he would have to know.

He practiced loading a rendezvous program. He touched the surface of his softscreen, and a little prompt panel opened up. He told the computer he wanted to change the program: he pressed the VERB function key, and then 3, 7, ENTER. He gave it the new program: P31, a rendezvous mode. 3,1, ENTER. He asked for data. VERB 0, 6; NOUN 8, 4. Five-digit numbers flashed up on the display area. That was the velocity change he’d need for the next maneuver.

The display could show decimal numbers, angles, octal numbers, time… He could only tell which was which by context, following his checklist.

The flight load had dozens of programs. Rosenberg would have to learn which was which, learn to select them without thinking. There wouldn’t be much help for him, if he had to run this stuff in anger. But then, nobody said it would be easy.

And besides, he was kind of enjoying this. It was like solving a series of little logical puzzles.

They nearly didn’t have computers in the old Apollos at all, he’d learned. Not everyone had agreed they needed them for navigation and rendezvous; ground control could cover all of that. Two arguments got computers in here. The first was the Russians. What if those Soviets tried to disrupt communications with Houston? The astronauts needed some way to get around the jamming by doing their own calculations. And the second was that NASA wanted to prepare for longer-duration missions, such as the flights to Mars that had never been funded: far enough away, you can’t afford to wait out the minutes, or hours, it might take for some number to come up from the ground; you needed a local processing ability.

Fear and dreams, he thought, that’s what had driven the computer technology, and everything else about Apollo, and maybe now the Titan mission as well. Fear and dreams.

The DSKY system was so counter-intuitive it was going to be tough to learn. But he had six years to study it, en route to Titan; if he ever needed to fly this ship he’d be able to play the crummy little gadget like a piano.

And anyhow he enjoyed the work. He enjoyed being tucked away, alone, in this humming little cabin with all its gadgets, occupying his mind with creaky old computer codes. It was a break from the complexities of life support, and his ambiguous and increasingly unwelcome role as ship’s doctor, and the sour relationships that prevailed in the hab module.

And besides, Rosenberg found himself being slowly seduced by the Apollo.

He loved the endless lockers, the compact equipment, the careful design and storage, the way everything was tucked away.

When he was a kid, he’d built himself a den cum spaceship something like this. It was just a plastic tent hung up inside a climbing frame. He had little food boxes in there, and stocks of soda, and a rolled-up Army-surplus sleeping bag in one corner, and a couple of boxes of cold lights. He’d landed on a hundred planets in that little ship, all of them contiguous with his mother’s backyard. He would peer through muddy plastic portholes, then creep out of his ship with his torch and his walkie-talkie and explore; but the main joy was to huddle back in the safety of his den, cocooned by his material and equipment, the stuff of his portable world, and write up his log.