Titan

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‘So it is,’ Benacerraf said. ‘I don’t know where the time goes.’ She rubbed her face; the balls of her eyes felt gritty, the muscles aching and sore.

Jackie sat at the table. ‘So how long has this been going on?’

‘Oh. Ten, eleven months or so.’

‘Ten months? My God, Mother.’

‘It isn’t so bad. I travel a lot; I catnap on flights or in the car. And there’s an end in sight. I’m working on a project. When it’s done I’ll be able to rest.’

‘Mom, you’re not as young as you were.’

Benacerraf sighed. ‘I guess it’s a daughter’s job to say things like that. Well, neither are you.’

‘But I know it. And you won’t catch me working like that.’ Jackie smiled, vaguely. ‘Life’s too short, Mom. After all, what job is worth wrecking your health for? Seriously, you shouldn’t let them push you so hard.’

Benacerraf reached behind to rub the muscles at the back of her neck. ‘There is no “them”. Or I’m part of “them”. I’m a senior official in the national space program. I have to try to make things happen. Besides, what doesn’t seem to occur to you is that maybe this work makes me happy.’

‘If that’s so, why are you so prickly?’

‘I’m not prickly, damn it –’ Benacerraf subsided, and Jackie grinned at her.

It was a familiar argument to Benacerraf. What is it with you young people? What in hell happened to the work ethnic? Don’t you take anything seriously? …

It was a long time since Jackie had tried to push ahead with her journalism. At times Benacerraf felt she couldn’t stand to see Jackie drift through her life like this, like so many of her age group, floating from one career option to another, passing through relationships that coalesced briefly – sometimes leaving behind kids, as had Jackie’s brief marriage – and on to the next vague destination.

It wasn’t the structure of Jackie’s life that bugged her, but her casualness, her lack of seriousness. There seemed no need to struggle, to take responsibility – no attempt to build things.

She suppressed the impulse to snap. Now, of all times, wasn’t the moment to pick a fight with her daughter.

Anyhow, she thought, maybe Jackie and her generation are right. Look at me, slaving here in the small hours, over this huge Titan boondoggle. Maybe my day is done. Maybe this project is the last spasm of whatever drove us, in the last century, to our great, ambitious endeavours. Perhaps when this is over – when my generation has gone, the last great rocket ships fired off – the world will sink back, lapse into a kind of high-tech pastoralism.

Jackie got up and walked to Benacerraf’s back, and took over rubbing her neck muscles for her.

‘That feels good,’ Benacerraf said.

‘Just like when I was a little girl, huh?’

‘Even then you always had good hands.’

‘All that tennis I played.’

‘You could have been a surgeon. A physiotherapist –’

Jackie laughed. ‘A carpenter, like Jesus. Come on, Mom; you’re sounding like a cliche again.’

‘Sorry.’

Jackie pointed to the softscreen, which Benacerraf had folded over. ‘You going to tell me what you’re working on?’

I’m not supposed to, Benacerraf thought. But you deserve to know.

‘Here.’ She unfolded the softscreen and smoothed out its creases.

Jackie sat down again, pulled the softscreen to her, and ran her finger over its smooth fabric surface, a reading habit she’d developed as a child.

… The purpose of this memorandum is to obtain your approval to use Space Shuttle and ancillary technology to fly an open-ended manned mission to Saturn’s Moon, Titan, in the short-term timeframe, with a resupply and retrieval strategy in the medium-term based on new-generation Reusable Launch Vehicle technology.

My recommendation is based on an exhaustive review of pertinent technical and operational factors and also careful consideration of the impact that either a success or a failure in this mission will have on the future of the Agency.

My objective has been to bring into meaningful perspective the trade-offs between total program risk and gain. As you know, this assessment process is inherently judgemental in nature. Many factors have been considered during a comprehensive series of reviews, conducted over the past several months, to examine in detail all facets of the considerations involved in planning for and providing a capability to fly a crew of five or six on a Titan landing mission. A key benefit for the Agency is the motivation such a mission provides for maintaining funding and commitment for the upcoming RLV program.

In conclusion, but with the proviso that all open work against the open-ended Titan mission is completed and certified, I request your approval to proceed with the implementation plan required to support an early launch readiness date.

Turning to details of the –

Jackie pushed the softscreen back across the table to her mother. ‘You can’t be serious,’ she said.

Benacerraf sipped her apple juice. ‘Never more so.’

‘Is this to do with all that JPL shit? My God, the arrogance. You can’t even fly to orbit and back without crashing all over the place. How do you imagine you can send people to Saturn?’

Benacerraf shrugged. ‘Do you really care? You’ll learn all about it when it gets made public, if you’re interested.’ As, she thought sourly, you probably won’t be.

But Jackie was staring at her. ‘Oh. Hold up. Hold it right there. I think I’m just starting to figure this out.’

‘Jackie, I –’

‘You want to go. Don’t you? To Titan, on this ridiculous one-way jaunt.’ She slammed the table. ‘Mother, you are not going to Saturn.’

Benacerraf was taken aback by her anger. ‘Jackie –’

‘Don’t you know what it’s like for me, when you fly in space, in that ludicrous old technology? Every moment you were off the ground in Columbia, I could think of nothing but the danger. And when Columbia went through the crash, I was convinced I wouldn’t see you again. Right now the kids are too young to understand, but soon … And now you talk about this, about leaving the Earth altogether?’

‘It isn’t like that. There’s a retrieval strategy, based on –’

‘You don’t understand, do you?’ Jackie’s eyes were dry, her expression hard. ‘Listen to me. Flying into space is meaningless. It always was. The technology is antiquated and unsafe, and there’s nowhere to go, and all your language of risk reduction is just a play with words. And for what? The whole thing is just a selfish stunt.’

Benacerraf felt her own anger building in response. ‘I won’t be called selfish by you. I’m more than just your mother, damn it. I’ve raised you, as best I could. And now you’re grown, my life is my own –’

Jackie snapped, ‘Why don’t you put that in your report?’ She walked out of the kitchen.

Benacerraf sat for long minutes.

Then she pulled the softscreen towards her.

Hadamard hauled on the thermal meteoroid garment. It was a heavy, floppy, deflated balloon made of tough white Beta-cloth. There were sockets over the front, where he plugged in his backpack umbilicals for oxygen, water and telecommunications.

Alongside him, Buzz Aldrin – thirty-nine years old, bald as a coot, and eager as a virgin – was climbing into his own suit.

The Moon suit, authentically rendered, was unbelievably primitive, Hadamard reflected. To think you actually had to assemble it, here on the lunar surface. It was incredible none of the Moonwalkers had been killed, betrayed by leaky plumbing.

When his suit was closed Hadamard flicked a switch, and the pumps and fans in his backpack started. He heard the hum of machinery, and oxygen whooshed across his face.

The veracity of the experience was extraordinary, right down to the sensation of increasing pressure in his ears.

He gave Aldrin a thumbs-up, and through his shining bubble helmet, Aldrin grinned back at him.

The first line in the script was Hadamard’s.

‘Houston, this is Tranquillity. We’re standing by for a go for cabin depress, over.’

Tranquillity Base, this is Houston. You are go for cabin depressurize, over.

Aldrin opened the valve that would vent Eagle’s oxygen to space. The pressure crept downwards, much more slowly than Hadamard had expected, despite his detailed knowledge of the timeline. It took all of three minutes to get down to four-tenths of a pound.

‘Everything is go here,’ Hadamard said. ‘We’re just waiting for the cabin pressure to bleed, to blow enough pressure to open the hatch …’ Hadamard could hear a stiffness in his own tone, as he pronounced the scripted words.

The events of the Moonwalk – at any rate the few minutes surrounding the first footstep itself – had become utterly familiar, through a thousand reproductions and adaptations and digitizations and dramatizations; it was thought that a copy of this script resided in every home with online access, which meant most of mainland US. The rest of Apollo – the later flights, even the rest of the Apollo II mission – had been largely forgotten now. But, Hadamard thought, the story of these few minutes of the first footstep was probably as familiar, in the public mind, as the story of the Nativity.

It was one hell of a legacy to manage.

‘Let me see if it will open now,’ Aldrin said. Clumsily, he reached down for the hatch handle. He tugged on the thin metal door, but it stayed firmly shut. Aldrin pulled vigorously, and Hadamard feared he might rip the thin metal shell of the Lunar Module. Finally Aldrin peeled back one corner of the door to break the seal.

The next part of the litany was Hadamard’s. ‘The hatch is coming open,’ he said, and he heard, spontaneously, excitement creep into his voice.

As if it were all real.

A flurry of ice particles gushed out into the lunar vacuum beyond the hatch, the last of the LM’s atmosphere.

Aldrin held the hatch open, and Hadamard sank to his knees and carefully moved his suited bulk backwards through the opening. It was awkward, confining, more like struggling to escape from the neck of a sack than leaving an aircraft.

The Aldrin simulation gave him running guidance. ‘Jake, you’re lined up nicely. Towards me a little bit. Okay, down. Roll to the left. Put your left foot to the right a little bit. You’re doing fine …’

Hadamard crawled out onto a large platform called the porch, which bridged the gap between the hatch and the ladder to the surface. He groped backwards with his boots, and found the top rung. He got hold of the porch’s handrails and raised himself upright, cautiously.

‘Okay, Houston, I’m on the porch.’

Before him was the blocky, shadowed bulk of the LM. Beyond that, reaching all the way to the close horizon, was a pocked, rock-strewn, tan brown surface. There were craters everywhere, of all sizes, right down to the little micrometeorite pits on the sides of the rocks that the astronauts had called zap pits. On some of the rocks he saw an exotic sparkle, like a glaze. The colours, though, depended on which way he looked, on the angle to the sun, as if he was looking through a polarizing filter.

He knew this representation had been beefed up from the original photographs with fractal technology. Those zap pits weren’t real, for instance. But it looked pretty convincing to Hadamard. He could well believe this place had been gardened, pulverized by meteorite strikes, for billions of years.

The land, he saw, actually curved, gently but noticeably, all the way to the horizon, and in every direction from him. He was standing on a rocky sphere, no more and no less. This was a small world indeed. The sky was utterly dark, save for the blue Earth, which was almost directly overhead, visible only if he tilted back his head …

‘What do you think of it?’

He turned. An astronaut had come bounding around the far side of the LM, her suit glowing white.

‘Paula?’

‘Hi, Jake.’

He felt an odd reluctance to come out of the illusion. ‘Disney-Coke have done a good job.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Maybe this was what it was all about in the first place, do you think? Circus stunts, entertainment? And maybe in a few more years these visitors’ centers will be all that’s left …’

‘Oh, how symbolic. And that’s why you’ve dragged me here today, Paula. Correct?’

‘Did you read my recommendation?’

‘Not past the management summary. No.’