Titan (3 page)

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Authors: Ben Bova

BOOK: Titan
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F
or an instant, nobody moved. No one spoke. Eberly shook his head groggily and sat up, rubbing the side of his face with one hand.
Holly broke the silence. “Pancho! For god’s sake!”
“It wasn’t my doing,” Eberly said, almost in a whine. “I tried to stop them.”
Pancho snorted and stepped past the man, suppressing an urge to kick him where it would do the most good. A pair of men in black coveralls moved toward her; both wore white armbands proclaiming SECURITY. Both had stun wands strapped to their hips. Wanamaker pushed in front of Pancho protectively.
“It’s all right,” Eberly told the security guards as he slowly got to his feet. “I’m not hurt.”
“Too bad,” Pancho huffed and, without a glance back, stepped through the open hatch.
Holly quickened her pace to catch up with her sister. “Pancho, he’s the elected head of this whole flamin’ habitat!”
“He stood aside and let those New Morality bastards beat you half to death,” Pancho growled, walking determinedly down the short passageway, Wanamaker at her side.
“That’s over and done with,” Holly said, from Pancho’s other side. “And they weren’t New Morality; they were from the Holy Disciples.”
“Whatever.”
“The people responsible have been sent back Earthside. One of them was killed—executed, for creep’s sake.”
Pancho stopped at the hatch set into the far end of the steel-walled passageway. “Come on, let’s get out of here before those network execs remember they’re in the news business and start sniffing after me. Where the hell are we, anyway? Am I going in the right direction?”
Holly’s anger dissolved; she grinned at her sister. “Yep, this is right. C’mon, let me show you.” And she tapped out a code on the keypad next to the hatch.
Pancho looked back over her shoulder. Eberly was on his feet, the two security guards flanking him, several of the visiting executives peering curiously in Pancho’s direction. Neither Eberly nor any of the incoming visitors had left the reception area, though.
The hatch swung inward and Pancho felt a breath of warm air puff against her face. Still grinning, Holly made a little bow and, with a sweep of her arm, announced, “Welcome to habitat
Goddard
.”
Pancho stepped through the hatch, Wanamaker right behind her. Despite her knowledge, despite her expectations, her jaw dropped open and she gasped with delighted surprise.
“Jumpin’ jeeps,” she breathed. “It’s a whole world in here.”
They were standing on an elevated knoll, with a clear view of the habitat’s broad interior. A green sunlit landscape stretched out in all directions around them. Gently rolling grassy hills, clumps of trees, little meandering streams went on and on into the hazy distance. Pancho’s breath caught in her throat. So much greenery! Nowhere off Earth had she seen such a … a … it was a paradise! A man-made Garden of Eden. The breeze was fragrant with the soft scent of flowers. Bushes thick with vivid red hibiscus and lavender jacarandas lined both sides of a curving path that led down to a village of low buildings, white and gleaming in the light streaming in through the solar windows that were wrapped around the great cylinder like a ring of brilliant sunshine.
It looks like one of those Mediterranean towns, Pancho thought. The village in the distance was set on the gentle slope of a grassy hill, overlooking a shimmering blue lake. Like the Amalfi coast in Italy. Like a picture out of a travel brochure.
This is what a perfect Mediterranean countryside would look like. She made out farmlands farther in the distance, square little fields of fresh bright green, and more villages of whitewashed buildings dotting the gently rolling hills. There was no horizon. Instead, the land simply curved up and up, hills and grass and trees and more little villages with their paved pathways and sparkling streams, up and up on all sides until she was craning her neck to look straight overhead at still more of the carefully, lovingly landscaped greenery.
“This is better’n any of the Lagrange point habitats,” Pancho told her sister. “This is
beautiful
.”
“It has to be,” Wanamaker said matter-of-factly, “for people to make it their permanent home.”
Pancho shook her head in wonderment and uttered a heartfelt “Wow.”
Holly beamed at them. “And I’m in charge of the human resources department.”
“Really?” Pancho asked.
“F’real, Panch.”
They dispatched Wanamaker to find the quarters that he and Pancho had been assigned to while Holly led her sister to her own apartment.
“Home sweet home,” Holly announced, as she ushered Pancho into her sitting room.
“Nice,” said Pancho, taking in the sparse furniture and minimal decorations. The place looked tidy and had that citrusy, almost antiseptic tang of a recent cleaning. She’s tidied up the place for me, Pancho thought, as she asked, “Are those smart walls?”
“You bet. I can program them to show almost anything you want.” Holly went to the desk in the corner and picked up a remote control wand. One entire wall of the room suddenly showed a real-time image of Saturn and its spectacular rings.
“Whoosh!” Pancho exclaimed. “It’s almost like being outside.”
“Sit.” Holly gestured toward the small sofa. “I’ll get us something cold to drink.”
Pancho sat on an upholstered chair while her sister went into the kitchen. Well, if she’s clanked up about me dropping in on her, Pancho thought, she sure doesn’t show it. She looks really glad to see me. Hope I didn’t embarrass her too much, sockin’ that Eberly creep.
“The walls don’t have voice recognition circuits?” she asked.
“Turned it off,” Holly called from the kitchen. “Too sensitive. Can’t hold a conversation without the walls thinking you’re talking to them.”
Pancho chuckled to herself as she pictured the wall screens flashing through a kaleidoscope of pictures while people chatted with one another.
From around the kitchen partition, Holly brought in a tray holding two tall frosted glasses and put it down on the coffee table, then sat beside her sister on the sofa.
“You’re lookin’ really good, kid,” Pancho said with a beaming smile. “Really good.”
“You too,” Holly replied guardedly.
Anyone would have recognized at a glance that they were sisters. Both women were tall and rangy: long, leggy and slim. Their skin color was slightly darker than a well-tanned Caucasian’s. Both their faces were sharp-featured, with flaring cheekbones and square, stubborn chins. Their eyes were the same dark brown, bright with intelligence and wit. Pancho had let her hair go entirely white and kept it cropped into a tight skullcap. Holly’s hair was still dark and cut in the latest spiky fashion.
“Is Eberly really the chief administrator for this whole habitat?” Pancho asked, reaching for one of the glasses.
“All ten thousand of us,” Holly replied. “He won a free and fair election.”
“But he was involved with those fanatics who tried to kill you. How can—”
“That’s all in the past, Panch. And he did try to stop them, y’know. Not very effectively,’ course, but he did try.”
Almost sheepishly, Pancho said, “Guess I shouldn’t have decked him.”
Holly giggled. “He sure looked surprised.”
Pancho grinned back at her and took a sip of her drink. Fruit juice. Good. Susie had done more than her share of booze and drugs. Pancho hoped Holly was different.
“Panch, why’d you come all the way out here?” Tension showed in the tone of Holly’s voice, in the sudden stiffness of her body.
“To spend the holidays with you, of course,” Pancho answered, trying to make it sound warm, natural. “You’re the only family I’ve got.”
Holly tried to unbend. “I mean, what do you intend to do here? This habitat isn’t a tourist resort, y’know.”
Pancho’s smile dimmed a little. “Listen, sis, I’m a rich woman, a retired multimillionaire. I got a terrific guy living with me, and we can go anywhere in the solar system we want. I decided to come out here and see how you’re doin’.”
“I’m fine.”
“Don’t be a shit-kicker, kid. I’m not here to pry into your life or try to tell you what to do. You’re a big girl now, Sooze, and I wouldn’t—”
“My name isn’t Susan anymore,” Holly snapped. “Hasn’t been for years.”
Pancho grimaced. “Yeah, I know. I’m sorry. Just slipped out.”
“And if you’re still worried about me and Malcolm Eberly, you can stop worrying. That’s over. Never got started, really.”
“I should think so, after what he did to you.”
“Not him, really. His friends. They tried to take over the habitat. It got a little rough for a while.”
“But it’s all over now?”
“His friends were shipped back Earthside. Malcolm’s the chief of the habitat’s government.”
Pancho’s brows rose. “I thought Professor Wilmot was in charge.”
“Not anymore. We set up our own constitution and government and all that soon’s we reached Saturn orbit.”
“And Eberly was elected to head it?”
“That’s right.”
“I wonder if he’ll take any action against me for sockin’ him.”
Holly thought a moment, then shook her head. “If he’d wanted to, he’d’ve got the security guards to take you into custody right there and then.”
“You think?”
“Yep.” Holly’s grin broke out again. “He knows he deserved what you gave him.”
Pancho grinned back at her. “You know the old saying about Hungarians?”
“Hungarians?”
“If you meet a Hungarian on the street, kick him. He’ll know why.”
The sisters laughed together, long and loud and unforced. But then Holly asked, “How long’re you going to stay?”
“Jeeps, kid, I just got here! Give me enough time to unpack my bags, huh?”
Frowning, Holly said, “I didn’t mean it that way, Panch. It’s just … well, I don’t need a mother hen anymore. I’ve been on my own for more’n three years now.”
Pancho grinned at her. “And you don’t want your pain-in-the-butt big sister lookin’ over your shoulder. Can’t say I blame you.”
Shifting her tactics a bit, Holly asked, “So who’s this guy you came with?”
“Jake Wanamaker?” Pancho’s grin turned mischievous. “Former admiral in the U.S. Navy. Headed military operations for Astro during the fighting out in the Belt.”
“You’re living with a sailor?”
“He’s my bodyguard.”
Holly looked at her sister for a long moment, then they both burst into laughter again.
“Wanna have dinner with us tonight?” Pancho asked.
“Cosmic! And I’ll bring a friend, too.”
“Great!” said Pancho with real enthusiasm. Maybe the ice is breaking a little, she thought. Maybe things will be okay between Sooze and me. Then she admonished herself: Don’t call her that. Her name’s not Susan anymore. She’s Holly. Holly. But looking into her sister’s deep brown eyes, Pancho remembered the helpless baby that she had raised after their parents
died. And she remembered shooting home the lethal injection that killed Susan when the medics refused to do it.
I had to kill you, Susie, Pancho said silently. So you could be reborn. And here you are, alive and healthy, all grown up, and suspicious as hell about your big sister.
T
his much is known about Titan, by far the largest of Saturn’s several dozen moons and the second largest moon in the entire solar system.
With a diameter of 5,150 kilometers, Titan is bigger than the planet Mercury and only a shade smaller than Jupiter’s largest satellite, Ganymede. Titan is the only moon in the solar system to possess a substantial atmosphere. Indeed, Titan’s atmosphere is 50 percent denser than Earth’s at ground level.
That atmosphere is composed mainly of nitrogen, laced with hydrocarbons such as methane, ethane and propane, plus nitrogen-carbon compounds such as hydrogen cyanide, cyanogen, and cyanoacetelyne. Shine sunlight on such an atmosphere and you get the same result you would in Los Angeles or Tokyo or Mexico City: photochemical smog, induced by solar ultraviolet light. Titan is a smog-covered world. Its predominantly orange coloring is due to this smog, which blankets Titan and makes it necessary for observations of its surface to be done in infrared wavelengths, which penetrate the smog, rather than visible light, which does not.
The incoming solar ultraviolet light, together with energetic electrons from nearby Saturn’s powerful magnetosphere, produce complex chemical reactions high in Titan’s thick atmosphere. Organic polymers called
tholins
are created, to drift downward deeper into the atmosphere and eventually fall onto the moon’s surface: black snow.
Laboratory experiments on Earth showed that tholins, when
dissolved in liquid water, yield amino acids, which are the building-block molecules of proteins and thus fundamental to life.
Orbiting more than a million kilometers from Saturn, which in turn lies twice as far from the Sun as Jupiter and ten times farther from the Sun than the Earth does, Titan’s surface temperature averages -183° Celsius. Titan is cold, too
cold
to have liquid water on its surface—except when a region might be heated temporarily by a volcanic eruption or the impact of a meteor. Or if the water is mixed with an antifreeze compound, such as ammonia or ethane derivatives.
Titan’s density is not quite twice that of water, which means that its body must be composed largely of ices—frozen water and/or frozen methane—with perhaps a small rocky core beneath a thick icy mantle.
Despite Titan’s low temperature, liquid droplets of ethane can form in its atmosphere and rain down onto the frigid surface, collecting as lakes or perhaps larger seas. There are streams of ethane (or ethane-laced water) carving out channels across the ground of ices. Several sizable seas of hydrocarbon-crusted liquid methane dot the moon’s surface.
Titan rotates on its axis in slightly less than sixteen Earth days, the same period as its orbit around Saturn. Thus Titan is “locked” in its rotation so that it always presents the same face to its planet, Saturn, just as our Moon presents the same face to Earth. But even a “locked” moon wobbles slightly in its orbit, and Titan’s rotation is perturbed slightly by its sizable neighbors, the moons Rhea and Hyperion, each of which is close to 1,500 kilometers in diameter. Titan rocks slightly back and forth as it orbits Saturn, a ponderous wobbling that creates strange tides in its hydrocarbon seas.
A world rich in carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen. A world where raindrops of ethane and sooty flakes of tholins fall from the smoggy sky. A world that contains rivers and streams of ethane or ethane-laced water, and methane seas. Although it is a very cold world, a primitive form of microbial cryogenic biology was found to exist on Titan’s surface by the earliest automated probes from distant Earth. Could there be a more sophisticated biosphere, perhaps deeper underground?
And there are large swaths of dark material carpeting parts of Titan’s surface. Early probes showed that they are rich in carbon compounds. Fields of frozen petroleum? Patches of solidified hydrocarbons? Swales of black tholin snowbanks piled on ground that is too cold for them to melt?
Or something else?

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