Titan. Stephen Baxter

was here. He had no choice. He would find it easier to climb Everest, to go to Titan, than to face himself, alone in a room, with no goals left. She’d seen it before, a dozen times, in the Astronaut Office. The blight of the co-pilot. At least Marcus had the wisdom to know himself. The stories were Angel had been doing a lot of drinking since the Columbia incident.

      But, she thought, he was competent.

      The younger astronauts, Libet and Mott, seemed embarrassed; they dropped their eyes and worked steadily on their drinks.

      Barbara Fahy cleared her throat. ‘The way I figure nobody is going the hell anywhere, let alone Titan.’ She looked around, at a circle of glum faces. ‘I mean it. It’s just unworkable.’

      Benacerraf said mildly, ‘How so?’

      Fahy said, ‘I’ve done some back-of-the-envelope figuring. How do you fly to Saturn? Saturn is ten times as far from the sun as Earth, remember. A Hohmann orbit, a minimum-energy transfer – which is all we could manage with chemical technology, which is all we got – would be a long, skinny ellipse touching Earth’s orbit at one extreme, and Saturn’s at the other. It would take six years to get there. Then you’d have to wait out a year at Saturn, until the planets got back into their correct alignment, and ride out the other half of the ellipse, back home. Total mission time thirteen years. Now, what size crew are you talking about? Five, six? How the hell are you going to supply and sustain a crew for a thirteen-year mission – all of it isolated from Earth? Christ, the longest missions we’ve run in Earth orbit without resupply are only a couple of months –’

      ‘ISRU,’ said Siobhan Libet.

      Fahy looked at her. ‘Huh?’

      Rosenberg said, ‘She’s right. In-situ resource utilization. You wouldn’t carry food for the Titan stopover. We’re landing, remember? There’s carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen down there. All sorts of organic and carbohydrate compounds.’

      ‘So that gets you through the year stopover. Maybe you could even resupply for the journey home,’ Fahy said. ‘But the main point still stands. You’d need to carry fuel to slow into Titan orbit. And all that fuel has to be hauled up and launched, in its turn, from an initial low Earth orbit. The numbers just multiply.

      ‘I figure you’re looking at millions of pounds of fuel to be hauled up to low Earth orbit. And the cargo capacity of the Shuttle to LEO is only sixty-five thousand pounds. Are you seriously proposing thirty, forty Shuttle missions?’

      ‘But you’d use gravity assists,’ Nicola Mott said. ‘Wouldn’t you? Like Cassini. You wouldn’t follow a simple Hohmann trajectory. You’d play the usual interplanetary pool: bounce off Earth, Venus, Jupiter maybe, and each time steal a little of their energy of rotation around the sun.’

      ‘Fine,’ said Angel thickly, ‘but if you’re talking about going in to Venus you’d have to carry sun-shields, and –’

      ‘Details,’ Marcus White said. ‘Fucking details. You always were a windy bastard, Angel.’

      Angel grinned. He said, ‘Okay. But even if you cut your initial mass in LEO by, say, fifty per cent, you’re still looking at dozens of Shuttle launches. And there’s no way Hadamard would back such a mission.’

      Barbara Fahy sighed. ‘He’s right, I’m afraid.’

      ‘No, he isn’t,’ Isaac Rosenberg said. ‘You’re making the wrong assumptions.’

      Angel said, ‘Huh?’

      Rosenberg said mildly, ‘What if you don’t come home?’

      There was a long silence.

      Kevin, the housekeeper, called them to eat.

      

      The meal was set up in small china dishes on candle-heated plate-warmers, all arranged on a big rotating serving platform on top of Benacerraf’s favourite piece of furniture, her walnut dining table. There was hot and sour soup, spare ribs, chicken in ginger, quorn with spring onions, Szechuan prawns, and a variety of rice and noodle plates; there was water, beer and wine on the table.

      Angel drained his glass again. ‘That kid of yours fixes a good drink,’ he said.

      ‘Yes. He’s a good cook, too.’

      White said, ‘What is he, working his way through college?’

      ‘… Something like that.’ She left it there. She doubted that White, who’d spent his adult life in the monkish confines of the space program, would understand much more.

      Kevin, from Galveston, was a pleasant, plump boy, twenty-three years old, already a college graduate. Actually he was earning his keep while he paid off his college debt, and pursued his art.

      Benacerraf had given him a garage, to use as a studio. Once, Kevin had shown Benacerraf his work. It was sculpture. The main piece was a large block of rendered animal-fat, made into a half-scale self-portrait of Kevin. The statue showed Kevin lowering his shorts and stroking his own genitals. The statue hadn’t been carved; Kevin had gnawed it, crudely, with his teeth. The marks of the teeth were clearly visible, especially where Kevin had used his chipped left incisor. Kevin explained that this was only a sketch; the final version would be made of human fat liposuctioned from his own body. Or maybe his faeces.

      Benacerraf didn’t go back into the garage after that.

      The thing of it was, Kevin didn’t have any other skills. He was a college graduate; his degree had been in recursive and self-referential art, with special studies of the greats of the 1990s: Janine Antoni, Sean Landers, Gregory Green, Charles Long.

      Demographic projections for Kevin’s age-group – with modern medical care, preventative programs, reduced-calorie dieting and prosthetics – predicted a full century of active life ahead of him. That, thought Benacerraf, provided time for a lot of shit-gnawing.

      At that, gnawing shit was better than creating nothing at all, which was to be the fate, as far as Benacerraf could see, of most of Kevin’s generation, as they lay in their VR-beds and pushed increasingly stale, second-hand information around the net.

      Kevin, anyhow, was a satisfactory housekeeper. Benacerraf paid his wages, and tried not to think about his future. She didn’t see what else she could do for him, or the millions like him, unemployed and unemployable …

      The seven of them gathered around the table and began to spoon food into their small bowls. Everyone but Marcus White opted to use chopsticks.

      Benacerraf, looking around at the ring of relaxed, candlelit faces, felt pleased. There was a warm, friendly, domestic atmosphere here; they were seven humans, rooted to the Earth, enjoying a shared ritual that dated back to the emergence of humanity.

      Her purpose, tonight, was to try to build this group into a team, who would have to work together to achieve something no other humans had attempted – and, if, impossibly, this proposal came to fruition, some of whom might soon depart the Earth forever.

      She still hadn’t decided whether to put her weight behind this dumb-ass Titan proposal. Up to now, it had just been a hobby, something to take her mind off the hierarchy of Flight Readiness Review records from STS – 143. The reaction of the group, tonight, could decide that.

      They started talking about Titan again.

      Nicola Mott said, ‘Let me go through this again. From the top. You’re seriously suggesting that we send a manned mission. That we travel one way, to colonize Titan.’

      ‘Why not?’ Rosenberg said. ‘Maybe we’re done with dipping our toes in the water and running.’

      ‘Like with Apollo,’ Marcus White said heavily.

      ‘Like with Apollo.’

      Rosenberg said, ‘Look, the whole point of this proposal is that we’re going to prove that a colony on Titan would be viable. More than that: it would soon become an actual economic asset to the United States, to Earth. How are we going to do