Читать книгу Titan - Stephen Baxter - Страница 8

‘What did you think you were doing, Rosenberg?’

Marcia Delbruck, Rosenberg’s project boss, was pacing around her office, formidable in her Berkeley sweatshirt and frizzed-up hair; she had a copy of Jackie Benacerraf’s life-on-Titan article loaded on her big wall-mounted softscreen. ‘You’ve made a joke of us all, of the whole project.’

‘That’s ridiculous, Marcia.’

‘You let this woman Jackie Benacerraf get to you. You just can’t handle women, can you, Rosenberg?’

Actually, he thought, no. But he wasn’t going to sit here and take this. ‘All I did was speculate a little.’

‘About life on Titan? Jesus Christ. Do you know how much damage that kind of crap can do?’

‘No. No, I don’t really see what damage that kind of crap can do. I know it’s bad science to go shooting my mouth off about tentative hypotheses before –’

‘It’s not the science. It’s the PR. Don’t you understand any of this?’ She sat down behind her desk. ‘Isaac, you have to look at the situation we’re in. Think back to the past. Look at 1964, when the first Mariner reached Mars. It was run out of JPL, right here –’

‘What has some forty-year-old probe got to do with anything?’

‘Lessons of history, Rosenberg. Back then, NASA was already thinking about how to follow on from Apollo. Mars would have been the next logical step, right? Move onward and outward, human expansion into the Solar System.

‘But Mariner found craters, like the Moon’s. They’d directed the craft over an area where they were expecting canals, for God’s sake.

‘All of a sudden, there was no point going to Mars after all, because there was nothing there except another sterile, irradiated ball of rock. You could say that handful of pictures, from that first Mariner, turned the history of space exploration. If Mars had been worth going to, we’d be there by now. Instead, NASA was just wound down.’

‘I know about the disappointment,’ he said icily. ‘I read Bradbury, and Clarke, and Heinlein. I can imagine how it was.’

‘NASA learned its corporate lesson, slowly and painfully.’ She thumped the desk with her closed fist to emphasize her words. ‘Look how carefully they handled the story of the organic materials they found in the Martian meteorite …’

‘Careful, yeah. But so what? They still haven’t flown a Mars sample-return mission to confirm –’

‘It’s not the point, Rosenberg,’ she snapped. ‘You don’t promise what you don’t deliver. You don’t yap to the media about finding life on Titan.’

‘All I talked about was the preliminary results, and what they might mean. You can hear the same stuff in the canteen here any day of the week.’

She tapped the clipping on her screen. ‘This isn’t the JPL canteen, Rosenberg.’

‘Anyway, what does NASA have to do with it? JPL’s an arm of Caltech; it’s organizationally independent –’

‘Don’t be smart, Rosenberg. Who the hell do you think you are? Maybe it’s escaped your notice, but you’re just one of a team here.’

The team lecture, he thought with dread. ‘I know.’ Rosenberg pushed the heels of his hands into his eye sockets. ‘I know about the line, and the matrix management structure, and my office, division, section, group and subgroup. I know about the organization charts and documentation trees.’ It was true. He did know all about that; he’d had to learn. An education in JPL’s peculiar politics was like a return to grade school biology, learning about kingdoms and phyla and classes.

‘Then,’ she snapped, ‘you know that you occupy one space in that organization, one little bitty square, and that’s where you should damn well stay. Leave the press to the PR people; they know how to handle it right … Look, Rosenberg, you have to come to some kind of accommodation with me. I’m telling you there’s no other way to run a major project like a deep space mission except with a tight, lean organization like ours. And it works. As long as we all work within it.’

‘Come on, Marcia. We shouldn’t be talking about organizational forms, for God’s sake. At the very least we’ve got evidence of a new kind of biochemistry, something completely new, out on the surface of that moon. We should be talking about the data, the results. About going back, a sample-return mission –’

‘Going back?’ She laughed. ‘Don’t you follow the news, Rosenberg? The Space Shuttle just crashed. Nobody knows what the hell the future is for NASA. If it has one at all.’

‘But we have to go back to Titan.’

‘Why?’

He couldn’t see why she would even pose the question. ‘Because there’s so much more to learn.’

‘Let me give you some advice, Rosenberg,’ she said. ‘We aren’t going back to Titan. Not in my lifetime, or yours. No matter what Huygens has found. Just as we aren’t going back to Venus, or Mercury, or Neptune. We’ll be lucky to shoot off a few more probes to Mars. Get used to the fact. And the way to do that is to get a life. I understand you, Rosenberg. Better than you think I do. Probably better than you understand yourself. Titan is always going to be out there. What’s the rush? What you’re talking about is yourself. What you mean is that you want to discover it all, before you die. That’s what motivates you. You can’t bear the thought of the universe going on without you, its events unfolding without your invaluable brain still being around to process them. Right?’

This sudden descent into personal analysis startled him; he had no idea what to say.

She sat back. ‘Look. I know you’re a good worker; I know we need people like you, who can think out of the box. But I don’t need you shooting your mouth off to the press. It’s not three months since Columbia came down. We’re trying to preserve Cassini, the last of the great JPL probes; you must know we haven’t secured funding for the extended mission yet. If you attract enough hostility, you could get us shut down, future projects killed …’

Slowly, he realized that she meant it. She was expressing a genuine fear: that if space scientists attracted too much attention – if they sounded as if they weren’t being ‘responsible’, as if they were shooting for the Moon again – then they’d be closed down.

In the first decade of a new millennium, a sense of wonder was dangerous.

Discreetly he checked his watch. He was meeting Paula Benacerraf later today. Maybe he could find some new way forward, with her. And …

But Delbruck was still talking at him. ‘Have you got it, Rosenberg? Have you?’

Rosenberg came to pick Benacerraf up, in person, from LAX. She shook Rosenberg’s offered hand, and climbed into the car.

Rosenberg swung through Glendale and then turned north on Linda Vista to go past the Rose Bowl. For a few miles they drove in silence, except for the rattling of the car, which was a clunker.

Rosenberg, half Benacerraf’s age, seemed almost shy.

Rosenberg’s driving was erratic – he took it at speed, with not much room for error – and he was a little wild-eyed, as if he’d been missing out on sleep. Probably he had; he seemed the type.

JPL wasn’t NASA, strictly speaking. She’d never been out here before, but she’d heard from insiders that JPL’s spirit of independence – and its campus-like atmosphere – were important to it, and notorious in the rest of the Agency.

So maybe she shouldn’t have been surprised to have been summoned out here like this, by Isaac Rosenberg, a skinny guy in his mid-twenties with glasses, bad skin, and thinning hair tied back in a fashion that had died out, to her knowledge, thirty years ago.

‘This seems a way to go,’ she remarked after a while. ‘We’re a long way out of Pasadena.’

‘Yeah,’ Rosenberg said. ‘Well, they used to test rockets here. Hence “Jet Propulsion Laboratory” …’ He kept talking; it seemed to make him feel more comfortable. ‘The history’s kind of interesting. It all started with a low-budget bunch of guys working out of Caltech, flying their rockets out of the Arroyo Seco, before the Second World War. They had huts of frame and corrugated metal, unheated and draughty, so crammed with rocket plumbing there was no room for a desk … And then a sprawling, expensive suburb got built all around them.

‘After the war the lab became an eyesore, and the residents in Flintridge and Altadena and La Canada started to complain about the static motor tests, and the flashing red lights at night.’

‘Red lights?’

He grinned. ‘It was missile test crews heading off for White Sands. But the rumours were that the lights were ambulances taking out bodies of workers killed in rocket tests.’

She smiled. ‘Are you sure they were just test crews? Or –’

‘Or maybe there’s been a cover-up.’ He whistled a snatch of the classic X-Files theme, and they both laughed. ‘I used to love that show,’ he said. ‘But I never got over the ice-dance version.’

He entered La Canada, an upper-middle-class suburb, lawns and children and ranch-style, white-painted houses, and turned a corner, and there was JPL. The lab was hemmed into a cramped and smoggy site, roughly triangular, bounded by the San Gabriel Mountains, the Arroyo Seco, and the neat homes of La Canada.

Rosenberg swung the car off the road.

There was a guard at the campus entrance; he waved them into a lot.

Rosenberg walked her through visitor control, and offered to show her around the campus.

They walked slowly down a central mall that was adorned with a fountain. The mall stretched from the gate into the main working area of the laboratory. Office buildings filled the Arroyo; some of them were drab, military-standard boxy structures, but there was also a tower of steel and glass, on the north side of the mall, and an auditorium on the south.

Crammed in here, it was evident that the only way JPL had been able to build was up.

Rosenberg said, ‘That’s the von Karman auditorium. A lot of great news conferences and public events took place in there: the first pictures from Mars, the Voyager pictures of Jupiter and Saturn –’

‘What about the glass tower?’

‘Building 180, for the administrators. Can’t you tell? Nine storeys of marble and glass sheathing.’ He pointed. ‘Executive suites on the top floor. I expect you’ll be up there later to meet the Director.’

The current JPL Director was a retired Air Force general. ‘Maybe,’ said Benacerraf. ‘It’s not on my schedule.’ And besides, she’d had enough Air Force in her face recently. ‘I wasn’t expecting quite so much landscaping.’

‘Yeah, but it’s limited to the public areas. I always think the place looks like a junior college that ran out of money half way through a building program. When the trees and flower pots appeared, the old-timers say, they knew it was all over for the organization. Landscaping is a sure sign of institutional decadence. You come to JPL to do the final far-out things, not for pot plants …’

She watched him. ‘You love the place, don’t you?’

He looked briefly embarrassed; it was clear he’d rather be talking at her than be analysed. ‘Hell, I don’t know. I like what’s been achieved here, I guess. Ms Benacerraf –’

‘Paula.’

He looked confused, comically. ‘Call me Rosenberg. But things are changing now. It seems to me I’m living through the long, drawn-out consequences of massive policy mistakes made long before I was born. And that makes me angry.’

‘Is that why you asked me to come out here?’

‘Kind of.’

He guided her into one of the buildings. He led her through corridors littered with computer terminals, storage media and printouts; there were close-up Ranger photographs of the Moon’s surface, casually framed and stuck on the walls.

But those Moon photographs were all of forty years old: just historic curios, as meaningless now as a Victorian naturalist’s collection of dead, pinned insects. There was an air of age, of decay about the place, she thought; the narrow corridors with their ceiling tiles were redolent of the corporate buildings of the middle of the last century.

JPL was showing its age. It had become a place of the past, not the future.

How sad.

He led her out back of the campus buildings, to a dusty area compressed against the Arroyo and the mountain. Here, the roughhewn character of the original 1940s laboratory remained: a huddle of two- and three-storey Army base buildings – now more than sixty years old – in standard-issue military paintwork.

Rosenberg pointed. ‘Even by the end of the war there were still only about a hundred workers here. Just lashed-up structures of corrugated metal, redwood tie and stone. See over there? They had a string of test pits dug into the side of the hill, lined with railroad ties. They called it the gulch. You had to drive to the site over a bumpy road that washed out in the rainy season … It was as crude as hell. And yet, the exploration of the Solar System started right here.’

‘Why are you showing me all this, Rosenberg?’

He took off his glasses and polished them on a corner of his T-shirt. ‘Because it’s all over for JPL,’ he said. ‘For decades, as far back as Apollo, NASA has starved JPL and space science to pay for Man-In-Space. And now – hell, I presume you’ve heard the scuttlebutt. They’re even going to close down the Deep Space Network. They’re already talking about mothballing the Hubble. And Goldstone will be turned over to the USAF for some kind of navel-searching reconnaissance work.’

‘It’s all politics, Rosenberg,’ Benacerraf said gently. ‘You have to understand. The White House has to respond to pressure from the likes of Congressman Maclachlan. They have to appear in control of their space budgets. So if they are throwing money at new launch vehicles to replace Shuttle, they have to cut somewhere else …’

‘But when we all calm down from our fright about the Chinese, they’ll just cut the launcher budgets anyhow, and we’ll be left with nothing. Paula, when it’s gone, it’s gone. The signals coming in from the last probes – the Voyagers, Galileo, Cassini – will fall on a deaf world. Think about that. And as for JPL, those sharks in the USAF have been waiting for something like Columbia, waiting for NASA to weaken. It’s as if they’re taking revenge. They’re going to turn us into a DoD-dedicated laboratory. The NASA links will be severed, and we’ll lose the space work, and all of our research will be classified, for good and all. The Pentagon calls it weaponization.’

‘Rosenberg –’

He looked into the sky. ‘Paula, in another decade, the planets are going to be no more than what they were, before 1960: just lights in the sky. The space program is over at last, killed by NASA and the USAF and the aerospace companies …’

No, she thought automatically. It’s more complex than that. It always was. The space program is a major national investment. It’s been shaped from the beginning by political, economic, technical factors, beyond anyone’s control …

And yet, she thought, standing here in the arroyo dust, she had the instinctive sense that Rosenberg was right. We’ve blown it. We could have done a hell of a lot more. We could have sent robot probes everywhere, multiplied our understanding a hundredfold.

Lights in the sky. That phrase snagged at her. She thought of the forty-year-old Moon photographs. At the LAX bookstalls she’d found rows of astrology books, on the science shelves. Was that the future she wanted to bequeath her grandchildren?

The sense of claustrophobia, of enclosure, she’d felt since returning to Earth increased.

‘Rosenberg, what is it you want?’

He put on his glasses and looked at her. ‘I want you people to start paying back.’

‘I’m listening.’

He guided her back towards the main campus. ‘If you had a free choice, which planet would you choose to go to? The Moon is dead, Venus is an inferno, and Mars is an ice ball, with a few fossils we might dig out of the deep rocks if we sent a team of geologists up there for a century.’

‘Then where?’

‘Titan,’ he said. ‘Titan …’

He led her to his cubicle in the science back room. It was piled deep with papers, journals, printout; the walls were coated with softscreens.

He sat down. He cleared a softscreen and dug out a Cassini image; it showed the shadowed limb of a smooth, orange-brown globe, billiard-ball featureless. ‘The Cassini-Huygens results have already taught us a hell of a lot about Titan,’ Rosenberg said. ‘It’s a moon of Saturn. But it’s as big as Mercury; hell, it’s a world in its own right. If it wasn’t in orbit around Saturn, if it had its own solar orbit, maybe we would have justified a mission to Titan for its own sake by now …’

Rosenberg brought up a low-altitude image, taken by the Huygens probe a few hundred yards above the surface. The quality was good, though the illumination was low. It was a landscape, she realized suddenly, and Rosenberg expanded on what she saw.

… A reddish colour dominated everything, although swathes of darker, older material streaked the landscape. Towards the horizon, beyond the slushy plain below, there were rolling hills with peaks stained dark red and yellow, with slashes of ochre on their flanks. But they were mountains of ice, not rock. An ethane lake had eroded the base of the hills, and there were visible scars in the hills’ profiles.

Clouds, red and orange, swirled above the hills and flooded the craters …

It was extraordinarily beautiful. Benacerraf felt she was being drawn into the screen, and she wanted to step through and float down through the thick air, her boots crunching into that slushy surface.

Rosenberg said, ‘Titan is the only moon in the Solar System with air, an atmosphere double the mass of Earth’s, mostly nitrogen, with some methane and hydrogen. The sunlight breaks down the methane into tholins – a mixture of hydrocarbons, nitriles and other polymers. That’s the orange-brown smog you can see here. Titan is an ice moon, pocked with craters, which are flooded with ethane. Crater lakes, Paula. The tholins rain out on the surface all the time; Huygens landed in a tholin slush, and we figure there is probably a layer, in some places a hundred yards thick, laid down over the dry land. Titan is an organic chemistry paradise …’

Benacerraf felt faintly bored. ‘I know about the science, Rosenberg.’

‘Paula, I want you to start thinking of Titan in a different way: not as a site of some vague scientific interest, but a resource.’

‘Resource?’

He began to snap out his words, precise, rehearsed. ‘Think about what we have here. Titan is an organic-synthesis machine, way off in the outer Solar System, which we can tune to serve Earthly life. It could become a factory, churning out fibres, food, any organic-chemistry product you like. Such as CHON food.’

‘Huh?’

‘Food manufactured from carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen. Paula, we know how to do this. Generally the comets have been suggested as an off-Earth resource for such raw materials. Titan’s a hell of a lot closer than most comets, and has vastly more mass besides.’ She could not help but see how his mind was working, so clear were his speculations, so transparent his body language.

‘So a colony could survive there,’ she said.

‘More than that. You could export foodstuffs to other colonies, to the inner planets, to Earth itself.’

She nodded. ‘Maybe. There must be cheaper ways to boost the food supply, though … What about a shorter term payoff?’

‘Oh, that’s easy. Helium – 3, from Saturn.’

‘Huh?’

He said patiently, ‘We mine helium – 3 from Saturn’s outer atmosphere, by scooping it off, and export it to Earth, to power fusion reactors. Helium – 3 is a better fuel than deuterium. And you know the Earth-Moon system is almost barren of it.’

She nodded slowly.

He said, ‘And further out in time, on a bigger scale, you could start exporting Titan’s volatiles, to inner planets lacking them.’

‘What volatiles?’

‘Nitrogen,’ he said. ‘An Earth-like biosphere needs nitrogen. Mars has none; Titan has plenty.’ He looked at her closely. ‘Paula, are you following me? Titan nitrogen could be used to terraform Mars.’ He started talking more rapidly. ‘That’s why Titan is vital. We may have only one shot at this, with the technology we have available now. If we could establish some kind of beachhead on Titan, we could use it as a base, long-term, for the colonization of the rest of the System. If we don’t – hell, it might be centuries before we could assemble the resources for another shot. If ever. I’ve thought this through. I have an integrated plan, on how a colony on Titan could be used as a springboard to open up the outer System, over short, medium and long scales … I’ll give you a copy.’

‘Yeah.’ She was starting to feel bewildered. My God, she thought. We can’t even fly our handful of thirty-year-old spaceplanes. We’ve sent one cut-price bucket of bolts down into Titan’s atmosphere. And here is this guy, this hairy JPL wacko, talking about interplanetary commerce, terraforming the bodies of the Solar System.

Future and past were seriously mixed up here, at JPL.

‘Rosenberg, don’t you think we ought to take this one step at a time? If we’re going to fly to other worlds, wouldn’t it be smarter to go somewhere closer to home? The Moon, even Mars?’

‘The old Tsiolkovsky plan,’ he said dismissively. ‘The von Braun scheme. Expand in an orderly way, one step at a time. But hasn’t the history of the last half-century taught us that it just won’t be like that? Paula, the Solar System is a big, empty, hostile place. You can’t envisage an orderly, progressive expansion out there; it will be more like the colonization of Polynesia – fragile ships, limping across the ocean to remote islands. And when you find somewhere friendly, you stop, colonize, and use it as a base to move on. Titan is about the friendliest island we can see; it’s resource-rich, with a shallow gravity well, and it’s a hell of a long way out from the sun. And that’s not all.’

‘What else?’

‘Paula, we think we’ve found life down there.’

‘I know. I read the World Weekly News.’

He looked offended. ‘It wasn’t World Weekly News. And it was your daughter’s report … Anyhow, this changes everything. Don’t you see? Titan is the future: not just for us, the space program, but for life itself in the Solar System.’

She looked, sideways, at his thin face, the orange light of Titan reflecting from his glasses. He didn’t look as if anybody had held him, close, maybe since his early teenage years. And here he was, trying to reach out across a billion miles, to putative beings in some murky puddle on another world.

She’d seen people like this before, on the fringes of the space program. Mostly lonely men. Rosenberg was dreaming of an impossible future. She wondered what it was inside of him he was trying to heal by doing this.

She felt sorry for him.

‘Let me get this straight,’ she said. ‘You want me to back a proposal to send another mission to Titan. Is that right? More probes – maybe some kind of sample return?’

He was shaking his head. She sensed that this situation was about to get worse.

‘No. You haven’t been listening. Not another probe. People,’ he said. ‘We have to send a crewed mission to Titan. We have to send people there.’ He turned in his seat and faced her, deadly serious.

‘Rosenberg, if I’d known you were going to propose something like this –’

‘I know.’ He grinned, and suddenly his looks were boyish. ‘You wouldn’t have flown out. That’s why I didn’t tell you. But I’m not crazy, and I don’t want to waste your time. Just listen.’

‘We don’t have the technology,’ she said. ‘We probably never will.’

‘But we do have the technology. What the hell else are you going to do with your grounded Shuttle fleet?’

‘You want to use Shuttle hardware to reach Titan? Rosenberg, it’s crazy even to think of going to Saturn with chemical rockets. It would take years –’

‘Actually, getting there is easy. So is surviving on the surface. The hard part is coming home …’

At a console, Rosenberg started showing her the preliminary delta-vee and propellant mass calculations he’d made; he was talking too quickly, and she tried to pay attention, following his argument.

She listened.

It was, of course, crazy.

But …

She found herself grinning. Sending people to Titan, huh?

Well, working on a proposal like this, if it could be made to hang together at all, would be a hell of a lot more fun than trawling around the crash inquiries and consultancy circuit forever. It would put bugs up a lot of asses. Including, she thought wickedly, Jackie’s.

In a satisfying way, in fact, her own involvement in this craziness was all Jackie’s fault.

And, what if it all resulted in something tangible? A Titan adventure would be a peg for a lot of young imaginations, in a future which was looking enclosing and bleak. JPL might be finished. So might the Shuttle program, all of America’s first space efforts. But maybe, out of their ashes, some kind of marker to a better future could be drawn.

Or maybe she just wanted to get back at Jackie.

She had a couple of hours before the flight back to Houston. She could afford to indulge Rosenberg a little more.

It would be a thought experiment. It might make a neat little paper for the Journal of Spacecraft and Rockets. Or maybe one of the sci-fi magazines.

She sat down and started to go through Rosenberg’s back-of-the-envelope numbers more carefully, trying to find the mistake that had to be in there, the hole that would make the whole thing fall apart, the reason why it was impossible to send people to Titan.

Nicola Mott did not want to go home.

She and Siobhan Libet, her sole crewmate on Station, had spent the last day packing the Soyuz reentry module as best they could with results from their work – biological and medical samples, data cassettes and diskettes, film cartridges, notebooks and softscreens. Then Libet dimmed the floods in the Service Module, the Station’s main component, and pulled out her sleeping bag.

But Mott didn’t want to sleep. She wanted to spin out these last few hours as much as she could.

So, alone, she made her way through the open hatch and down to the end of the FGB module, the Russian-built energy block docked on the end of the Service Module.

She stared out the window at the shining, wrinkled surface of the Pacific.

The shadows of the light, high clouds on the water grew longer, and the Station passed abruptly into night. She huddled by the window, curling up into a foetal ball. She could see the lights of a ship, crawling across the skin of the darkened ocean.

She – Nicola Mott, English-born astronaut – might be the last Westerner ever to see such sights, she thought.

She was too young to remember Apollo, barely old enough to remember Skylab and ASTP. She’d been eleven, in the middle of an English spring, when Columbia made her maiden flight, and it had been a hell of a thrill. But after a while she started to wonder why these beautiful spaceships kept on flying up to orbit and coming back down without ever going anywhere.

And when she’d come to understand that, she started to realize that she’d been born at the wrong time: born too late to witness, still less participate in, Apollo; born too early, probably, to witness whatever came next.

Still, she’d decided to make her own way. She’d moved to America and worked through a short career at McDonnell Douglas, where she’d worked on the design and construction of a component of Station called the Integrated Truss Segment So, a piece that now looked as if it would never be shipped out of the McDonnell plant at Huntingdon Beach. She’d enjoyed her time at Huntingdon, looking back; the Balsa Avenue assembly area had the air of an ordinary industrial plant, no fancy NASA-style airlocks or clean rooms …

Anyhow, then she’d transferred to NASA. She’d worked as a payload controller in Mission Control, and then, at her third attempt, made it into the Astronaut Office. She’d paid her dues as an ascan, and finally been attached to a Shuttle flight – STS – 141, Atlantis – and come flying up here, to Station, for a six-month vigil.

It turned out to be a question of just surviving in this shack of a Service Module, boring a hole in the sky for month after month. Russian and American crews, brought up by Shuttle, had been rotating up here on six-month shifts, struggling to do some real research in these primitive conditions, their main purpose to keep this rump of the Station alive with basic maintenance and housekeeping.

Even so, at first she’d been thrilled just to be in space, all these years after those Illinois dreams. And as her relationship with Siobhan Libet had matured, the experience had come to seem magical.

Then, after a few weeks of circling the Earth, she’d got oddly frustrated. She got bored with the stodgy Russian food and with the daily regime of exercise and dull maintenance. The Station blocks were so small compared to the huge spaces out there; it seemed absurd to be so confined, to huddle up against the warm skin of Earth like this.

Damn it, she wanted to go somewhere. Such as Titan, where those hairies at JPL thought they’d found life signs … But nobody was offering a ride.

It wasn’t really the great tragic downfall in human destiny that was bothering her, she admitted. It was her own screwed-up career.

Mott was thirty-four years old, and she wasn’t given to morbid late-night thoughts like these. She started to feel cold, and, suddenly, terribly lonely. Staying up all night no longer seemed such a great idea.

She pulled herself back through to the Service Module.

The interior of Station was cramped and crowded. The walls were lined with instrument panels, wall mounts for air-scrubbing lithium chlorate canisters, other equipment. These two modules had been serving alone as the core of the Space Station for too many years now, and as parts had worn out replacements had been flown up and crudely bolted in place, and new experiments had been brought up here and fixed to whatever wall space was available. As a result the clutter was prodigious; cables and pipes and lagged ducts trailed everywhere, and there was a sour smell, the stink of people locked up in a small space for too long.

She pressurized the water tank, and fired the spigot. A globe of water came shimmering through the air towards her face, the lights of the module sharply reflected in its meniscus. She opened her mouth and let the water drift in; when she closed her mouth around the globule it was as if the water exploded over her palate, crisp and cold.

If she couldn’t get back into space, she’d never in her life be able to take a drink like that again, she thought. Returning to Earth was going to be like a little death.

Her sleeping compartment was a space like a broom cupboard, with its own window, cluttered with bits of gear and clothing. Her sleeping bag was fixed straight up and down against the wall of the module, and she had to crane her neck to see out of her window, at the slice of Earth which drifted past there. With the Earthlight, and the subdued floods of the compartment, the Service Module was pretty bright, and the pumps and ventilation fans kept up a continual rattle. It was like being in the guts of some huge machine.

She pulled herself deeper into her sleeping bag, which soon became warm enough for her to be able to forget the endless vacuum a few inches away from her face, beyond the module’s cladded hull.

After an unmeasured time, she felt a hand stroking her back. She turned in her bag. Siobhan, naked, her hair floating around her face in a big burst of colour, was silhouetted against the cabin lights.

Mott smiled and reached out. She brushed Libet’s hair back, revealing her fine, high brow. ‘You look like Barbarella,’ she said.

‘In your dreams. Are you going to let me in?’

The sleeping bags were too small for two people. But they’d found a way of zipping their two bags together. It was cold, the opening at the top liable to let in draughts, but their bodies would soon build up a layer of warm air around them.

‘Anyhow,’ Mott said, ‘I thought you wanted to sleep.’

‘I did. I do. But I guess I can spend the rest of my life asleep. Down there, at the bottom of the gravity well. This seems too good an opportunity to pass up. The last time anyone will be having sex in space, for a long, long time …’

Mott clung to Libet.

Libet stroked her back. ‘Who was the first, do you think? The first orgasm in space.’

Mott snorted. ‘Yuri Gagarin, probably. Or one of those Mercury assholes fulfilling a bet. Maybe even old Al Shepard managed it.’

‘Oh, come on. He only had fifteen minutes. Even Big Al couldn’t have done it in that time. Anyway, those Mercury suits were hard to open up.’

‘Fifteen minutes. Well, we haven’t got much longer.’

Libet’s hand, warm now, moved over Mott’s stomach. ‘From first to last.’

‘From first to last,’ Mott said, and she closed her eyes.

She was woken by a buzzer alarm, at 4 a.m. It felt as if she hadn’t slept at all.

They prepared a hasty meal: tinned fish and potatoes, tubes of soft cheese, and a vegetable puree that had to be reconstituted with hot water. The rations were Russian standard, and, as usual, tasted salty and heavy with butter and cream to Mott. She drank sweet coffee from a plastic bag with a roll-out spout. She tried not to drink too much; she was going to be in her pressure suit for a long time.

Libet went down to the Soyuz to run a final check, and Mott got herself dressed in her stiff Russian-design pressure suit.

Libet suited up in her turn, and they pressurized each other’s suits, making sure they were airtight. Then Mott tested her pressure-release valve, a large knob on the suit’s chest panel.

She pocketed some souvenirs: her Swiss army knife, photographs.

By six a.m. they were both ready to leave.

A TV camera was mounted in one corner of the Service Module, all but concealed amid the equipment lockers and cables there. The camera was mute, no red light showing. It looked as if nobody wanted to record these last acts of the American manned space program, two unhappy astronauts clambering into Russian pressure suits.

Mott led the way for the last time out of the Service Module and through the FGB towards Soyuz. Behind her, Libet killed the lights in the Service Module.

The waiting Soyuz was stuck on the side of the FGB, nose-first.

She could see through blister windows in the FGB that the body of the ship was a light blue-green, an oddly beautiful, Earthlike colour. The Soyuz looked something like a pepperpot, a bug-like shape nine feet across. Two matte-black solar panels jutted from its rounded flanks, like unfolded wings, and a parabolic antenna was held away from the ship, on a light gantry. Soyuz was basically a Gemini-era craft, still flying in this first decade of a new millennium. And today, Mott and Libet were going to have to ride Soyuz home.

The Soyuz was strictly an assured crew return vehicle, in the nomenclature of the Station project, a simple mechanism for the crew to make it back to Earth in case the Shuttle, the primary crew ferry, couldn’t make it in some emergency. The Mission Controllers, down in Houston and Kalinin, had decided that the Columbia incident and subsequent Shuttle grounding constituted just such an emergency.

The Soyuz’s Orbital Module was a ball stuck to the craft’s front end, lined with lockers, just big enough for one person to stretch out. It would be discarded to burn up during the reentry, so Mott and Libet had packed it full of garbage. Now Mott had to struggle through discarded food containers and clothing and equipment wrappers, many of them floating around, to get through to the Descent Module. It was like struggling through a surreal blizzard.

The Descent Module, the headlight-shaped compartment in which they would make their return to Earth, was laid out superficially like an Apollo Command Module, with three lumpy-looking moulded couches set out in a fan formation, their lower halves touching. There were two circular windows, facing out beside the two outer seats. Big electronics racks filled up the space beneath the couches, and a large moulded compartment on one wall contained the main parachute. Mott slid herself in, feet-first, wriggling until she could feel the contours of the right-hand seat under her. The seat was too short for her, and compressed her at her shoulders and calves.

There was a small, circular pane of glass at Mott’s right elbow. She peered out of this now, trying to lose herself in the view of blue Earth.

After a few minutes, Libet floated headfirst into the compartment. She pushed the last of the garbage back into the Orbital Module, and dogged the hatch closed. Then she somersaulted neatly and slid into the center couch, compressing Mott against the wall; their lower legs were in contact, and there was no space for her to move away.

The two of them began to work through a pre-entry checklist.

At a little after 9.00 a.m., it was time for the undocking. The clamps that held the craft together were released. A spring connector pushed at the Soyuz; there was a gentle thump, and the Soyuz drifted gently away from Station.

For an hour, Libet used the Soyuz’s crude hand controller to fly the ferry around Station. Mott was supposed to take a final set of photographs of the abandoned Station before the descent. She had to sit up out of her couch and wedge herself in the small porthole to get the shots.

Mott could see the whole assembly, floating against a curving horizon, with the meniscus of clouds masking the ground below. In the light of Earth, Station was brightly illuminated, a T-shaped mélange of greys, greens, whites. It looked quite delicate and beautiful.

The unfinished Station looked pretty much like Mir had, in an early stage of its construction, she supposed. The two main blocks, both orbited by Russian Protons, were the Service Module, a three-crew habitat based closely on the Mir’s base block, and the FGB, based on the Mir’s Kvant supply module. The two modules were squat cylinders, docked end-to-end, punctuated with small round portholes, and coated with thermal insulation, a powdery cloth that was peppered by fist-sized meteorite scars. Small solar panels stretched out to either side of each module, like battered wings, with big charcoal-black cells and fat wires fixed in place with crude blobs of solder. A Progress unmanned ferry, another Soyuz variant, was docked to the Service Module’s aft port, on the other side from the FGB.

On the forward port of the FGB was docked the main American contribution to date, a small module called Resource Node 1, which had provided storage space for supplies and equipment, berthing ports, a Shuttle docking port, and attachment points for more modules and the Station’s large truss: a gantry that would have stretched all of three hundred and sixty feet long, with the huge photovoltaic arrays stretching out to either side.

But the assembly hadn’t got that far. Only the first piece of the truss, a small complex element called Z1, had been hauled up by Endeavour and fitted to the top of Node 1. Future flights would have brought up more truss segments, the comparatively luxurious US habitation module, and the multinational lab modules, sleek, modern-looking cylinders the size of railway carriages which would have clustered closely around the Resource Nodes.

In fact, the completed Station would have looked, she thought, like a collision between the twenty-first century and the twentieth – the modern American design, components and concepts inherited from the billions invested in abortive Space Station studies since 1984, forced together with a second-generation Russian Mir.

It was all such a waste.

If they’d flown up one more mission, STS – 94, at least they’d have had a serious science facility up here. STS – 94 would have been the fifth US assembly flight; it would have delivered the first US lab module, complete with thirteen racks of science equipment, life support, maintenance and control gear. And they would have been able to do some real work up here, instead of the small-scale make-work experiments they’d had to run: monitoring herself for drug metabolism by taking saliva samples, checking for radiation health with miniature dosimeters strapped to her body, checking her respiration during exercises on the treadmill, investigating the relationship between bone density and venous pressure by wearing dumb little tourniquets around her ankle …

STS – 94 had been scheduled for early 1999. Delays, funding cuts and problems with the early Station modules and operations had pushed back its launch five years. And now, it would never fly, and Station would never be completed.

Soyuz was passing over South America. Mott could see the pale fresh water of the Amazon, the current so strong it had still failed to mingle, hundreds of miles off shore, with the dark salt ocean.

The retro rockets fired with a solid thump. For the first time in four months a sensation of weight returned to Mott, and she was pressed into her seat.

When the burn was done, the feeling of weight disappeared. But now the Soyuz was no longer in a free orbit but was falling rapidly towards Earth.

There was something wrong with her eyes. She lifted up her hand, and found salt water, big thick drops of it, welling over her cheeks.

She was crying. Damn it.

‘Dabro pazhalavat,’ Siobhan Libet said softly. ‘Welcome home.’

Through her window now she could see nothing but blackness.

Jake Hadamard called Benacerraf. She was in her room in the Astronaut Office at JSC, poring over a technical reconstruction of the multiple failures that had destroyed Columbia’s APUs.

‘Hi. I’m here at JSC. Look, I need to talk to you. Can you get away?’

When she heard the Administrator’s dry voice, she felt pressure piling up on top of her, a force as tangible as the deceleration which had dragged her down into her canvas seat, during that last reentry from space. What now? ‘Do you want me to come over?’

‘No. Let’s get out of here, for a couple of hours. Meet me at the Public Affairs Office parking lot …’

It was a bizarre request, but Benacerraf sure as hell needed a break. She pulled on a light white sweatshirt and a broad-brimmed hat, and went out to the elevator.

It was three p.m. on a hot July afternoon.

She emerged into a Mediterranean flat heat – after the dry, cold air-conditioning it was like walking into a wall of dampness – and she was immersed in the steady chirp of crickets. She walked across the courtyard of the JSC campus towards Second Street, which led to the main gate.

The blocky black and white buildings of JSC were scattered over the landscaped lawns like children’s blocks, with big black nursery-style identifying numbers on their sides. Between the buildings were Chinese tallow trees and tough, thick-bladed, glowing green Texas grass; sprinklers seemed to work all the time, hissing peacefully, a sound that always reminded her of a Joni Mitchell album she’d gotten too fond of in her teenage years.

But JSC was showing its age. Most of the buildings were more than forty years old; despite the boldness of the chunky 1960s style the buildings themselves were visibly ageing, and after decades of budget cutbacks looked shabby: the concrete stained, the paint peeling. On her first visits here she’d been struck by the narrow corridors and gloomy ceiling tiles of many of the older buildings; it was more like some beat-up welfare agency than the core of a space program.

As he’d promised, Jake Hadamard was waiting for her at the car park close to the PAO. The lot was pretty full: old hands said wearily that there hadn’t been so much press interest in NASA since Challenger.

They piled into Hadamard’s car. It was a small ’oo Dodge. He drove out through the security barrier, down Second Street, and towards NASA Road One, the public highway. Hadamard grinned. ‘I have a limousine here I can use, with a driver,’ he said. ‘But my job is kind of diffuse. I like to be able to do things personally from time to time.’

Benacerraf said, ‘So, you drive for release.’

‘I guess.’

To the right of Second Street, which ran through the heart of JSC, was the Center’s rocket garden. There was a Little Joe – a test rocket for Apollo – and a Mercury-Redstone, looking absurdly small and delicate. The black-and-white-striped Redstone booster was just a simple tube, so slim the Mercury capsule’s heat shield overhung it. The Redstone was upright but braced against wind damage with wires; it looked, Benacerraf thought, as if it had been tied to the Earth, Gulliver-style. And, just before the big stone ‘Lyndon B Johnson Space Center’ entry sign at NASA One, they passed, on the right, the Big S itself: a Saturn V moon rocket, complete with Apollo, broken into pieces and lying on its side.

A small group of tourists, evidently bussed over from the visitors’ center, Space Center Houston, hung about in front of the Redstone. They wore shorts and baseball caps, and their bare skin was coated with image-tattoos, and they looked up at the Redstone with baffled incomprehension.

But then, Benacerraf thought, it was already more than four decades since Alan Shepard’s first sub-orbital lob in a tin can like this. Two generations. No wonder these young bedecked visitors looked on these crude Cold War relics with bemusement.

Hadamard pulled out onto NASA Road One, and headed west. As he drove he sat upright, his grey-blond hair close-cropped, his hands resting confidently on the wheel as the car’s internal processor took them smoothly through the traffic.

They cut south down West NASA Boulevard, and pulled off the road and into a park. Hadamard drove into a parking area. The lot was empty save for a big yellow school bus.

‘Let’s walk,’ Hadamard said.

They got out of the car.

The park was wide, flat, tree-lined, green. The air was still, silent, save for the sharp-edged rustle of crickets, and the distant voices of a bunch of children, presumably decanted from the bus. Benacerraf could see the kids in the middle distance, running back and forth, some kind of sports day.

Hadamard, wearing neat dark sunglasses and a NASA baseball cap, led the way across the field.

Benacerraf took a big breath of air, and swung her arms around in the empty space.

Hadamard grinned at her, and his shades cast dazzling highlights. ‘Feels like coming home, huh.’

‘You bet.’ She thought about it. ‘You know, I don’t think I’ve walked on grass, except for taking short cuts across the JSC campus, since I got back from orbit.’

‘You should get out more.’ He scuffed at the grass with his patent leather shoes. ‘This is where we belong, after all. Here, on Earth, where we’ve spent four billion years adapting to the weather.’

‘So you don’t think we ought to be travelling in space.’

He shrugged, and patted at his belly. ‘Not in this kind of design. A big heavy bag of water. Spacecraft are mostly plumbing, after all … Humans don’t belong up there.’

‘Oh, come on.’

‘Well, they don’t. You should hear what the scientists say to me. Every time someone sneezes on Station, a microgravity protein growth experiment is wrecked.’

Benacerraf said, ‘You’re repeating the criticisms that are coming out in the Commission hearings. You know, it’s like 1967 over again, after the Apollo fire.’

‘Yes, but back then they managed to restrict the inquiries afterward to a NASA internal investigation. And that meant they could keep most of the recommendations technical rather than managerial.’

Benacerraf grunted. ‘Neat trick.’

Hadamard laughed. ‘Well, the Administrator back then was a wily old fox who knew how to play those guys up on the Hill. But I’m no Jim Webb. After Challenger we had a Presidential Commission, just like the one that we’re facing now.’

They reached the woods, and the seagull-like cries of the children receded.

Eventually they came to a glade. A monument stood on a little square of bark-covered ground, enclosed by the trees, and the dappled sunlight reflected from its upper surface. It was box-like, waist high, and constructed of some kind of black granite.

It was peaceful here. She wondered what the hell Hadamard wanted.

Jake Hadamard took a deep breath, pulled off his sunglasses, and looked at Benacerraf. ‘Paula, do you know where you are? When I first came to work at NASA, I was struck by the –’ he hesitated ‘– the invisibility of the Challenger incident. I mean, there are plenty of monuments around JSC to the great triumphs of the past, like Apollo 11. Pictures on the walls, the flight directors’ retirement plaques, Mission Control in Building 30 restored 1960s style as a national monument, for God’s sake.

‘But Challenger might never have happened.

‘It’s the same if you go around the Visitors’ Center. You have your Lego exhibits and your Station displays and your pig-iron toy Shuttles in the playground, and that inspirational music playing on a tape loop all the time. But again, Challenger might never have happened.

‘Outside NASA, it’s different. For the rest of us, Challenger was one of the defining moments of the 1980s. The moment when a dream died.’

He said us. Benacerraf found the word startling; she studied Hadamard with new interest.

He said, ‘Look around Houston and Clear Lake. You have Challenger malls and car lots and drug stores … And look at this monument.’

Benacerraf bent to see. The monument’s white lettering had weathered badly, but she could still make out the Harris County shield inset on the front, and, on the top, the mission patch for Challenger’s final flight: against a Stars-and-Stripes background, the doomed orbiter flying around Earth, with those seven too-familiar names around the rim: McNair, Onizuka, Resnik, Scobee, Smith, Jarvis, McAuliffe.

‘We’re in the Challenger Seven Memorial Park,’ Hadamard said. ‘You see, what’s interesting to me is that this little monument wasn’t raised by NASA, but by the local people.’

‘I don’t see what you’re getting at, Jake.’

‘I’m trying to understand how, over two decades, these NASA people have come to terms with the Challenger thing. Because I need to learn how to size up the recommendations I’m getting from you for the way forward after Columbia.’

Benacerraf said, ‘You want to know if you can trust us.’

He didn’t smile.

‘NASA people didn’t launch that Chinese girl into orbit,’ she said. ‘And that’s the source of the pressure on you to come up with some way to keep flying.’

‘Is it?’

Benacerraf decided to probe. ‘You know, now that I’m getting to know you, you aren’t what I expected.’

He smiled. ‘Not just a bean counter, a politico on the make? Paula, I am both of those things. I’m not going to deny it, and I’m not ashamed of either of them. We need politicos and bean counters to make our world go round. But –’

‘What?’

‘I wasn’t born an accountant. I was seventeen when Apollo II landed. I painted my room black with stars, and had a big Moon map on the ceiling –’

‘You?’

‘Sure.’

‘And you’re the NASA Administrator.’

He shrugged. ‘I’m the Administrator who was on watch when Columbia turned into a footprint on that salt lake.

‘I’m going through hell, frankly, facing that White House Commission. Phil Gamble is getting the whipping in the media, but the Commission are just beating up on me. And then there’s the pressure from the Air Force. You know, over the years the Air Force has made some big mistakes chasing manned spaceflight. They wasted a lot of money on projects that didn’t come to fruition: the X – 20 spaceplane, the Manned Orbiting Laboratory … In the 1970s they were pushed into relying on the Shuttle as their sole launch vehicle. That single space policy mistake cost them twenty billion dollars, they tell me, in today’s money. And now we got Columbia, and the fleet is grounded again. You can bet that if Shuttle never flies again, there will be plenty in USAF who won’t shed a tear.

‘Now, facing lobbies like that, with institutional rivalries going back a half century, I sure as hell am not prepared to go into bat for any kind of shit-headed NASA insider stuff about how everything is fine and dandy, just another technical glitch we can get over with a little work. Did you know that the NASA management recommended just continuing with the Shuttle launch schedule in the immediate wake of Challenger? They had to be forced to take a hiatus while they figured out and fixed the problems. You will not find this Administrator making the same mistake.’

‘I’ll tell you how we can minimize risk,’ Benacerraf said hotly. ‘We just won’t fly. Jake, we’re flying experimental aircraft, here. You just can’t expect the public to see it this way. We’re the professionals. We understand the risks, and we accept them. That’s why there are no Challenger tombstones and memorials and plaques all over JSC. Jake, you have to have a little taste. You can’t keep looking back at some disaster, all the time. We have to move on. We’re looking at the future of humanity here, the expansion of the human race into –’

Hadamard waved her silent. ‘Let’s save the speeches, Paula. Besides, I think you are too smart to believe it. The truth is we are never going to move out into deep space. There’s nowhere to go. The Moon’s dead, Venus is an inferno, Mars is almost as dead as the Moon. And even if there was a worthwhile destination the journey would kill us. We’re not going anywhere, not in our lifetimes, probably not ever. It was always just a dream. People understand that, instinctively, in a way they never did in the 1960s, during Apollo. That’s why, I fear, they’re sick of spaceflight – Shuttle, the Station – and sick of the people who promote it.’

His words, though mildly expressed, seemed brutally hard. Benacerraf shivered, suddenly, despite the continuing warmth of the day. My God, she thought. He’s going to let it go. Is that what he’s brought me here to tell me?

Here in this nondescript wood, beside this slightly tacky memorial, she could be witnessing the death of the US manned space program.

They turned and began to walk out of the wood, back towards the car.

‘Why did you ask to see me, today? What do you want of me?’

‘We’re going to be hit hard by Congress and the White House and the DoD over Columbia, Paula. Whatever I decide, I might not survive myself. And even if I do I’m going to have to shake up many levels of the management hierarchy, in all the centers. I’m trying to think ahead.

‘I know I’m going to need someone to take over the Shuttle program. A fresh face. A management outsider, Paula, someone who’s untainted by all the NASA crap.’

She frowned. ‘You mean me?’

‘You’ve the right qualifications, the right experience. I’ve watched how you’ve handled yourself in the fall-out from Columbia, and I’ve been impressed. And you have the right air of distance from the real insiders.’

She said, ‘My God. You’re asking me to oversee the dismantling of the Shuttle program.’

‘Mothballing, Paula. That’s the language we’ll use. Look, it’s an important job.’

‘To you?’

He grinned. ‘Hell, yes, to me. What did you think I meant?’

‘But what about all the other programs? The stuff you started after Chinese-Sputnik panic, the RLV initiatives …’

‘Frankly,’ Hadamard said, ‘I don’t much care. If some damn Shuttle II ever flies, it will be long after I’m out of the hot seat. And if it ever does fly you know Maclachlan will just shut it down, when he takes the White House. All that matters to me is how to use up the Shuttle technology. That project, unlike RLV, will come to fruition during my term.’

Benacerraf got it. It could be that a judicious, sensitively handled wind-down of Shuttle would be the criterion on which Hadamard would be judged: on which the rest of his career might depend.

‘Sure. So what about the components? What do we do with the three remaining orbiters?’

‘You’ve heard some of the suggestions. You’ll hear more. The dreamers at Marshall want to respond to the Chinese, to go to the Moon. As ever. The USAF want nuclear space battle stations, or to practise sub-orbital bomb runs over Moscow. The Navy want to use the birds as target practice. And so on.’

‘Do you have a preference?’

‘Only that whatever you come up with fits the mood.’ He smiled sadly. ‘Anyhow, JSC could use a new lawn ornament. The one we have now is getting a little rusty.’

‘I understand,’ she said sourly.

Lawn ornaments. Jesus.

She did understand. Hadamard wanted her to guide what was left of the Shuttle program through the current panic about the Chinese, all the way to the usual run-down and cancellations that would follow.

But, she thought, maybe it didn’t have to be like that.

If she took this job, she would move into a position where she could make things happen.

And there are, she thought, other possibilities than turning spaceships into lawn ornaments. Even if doing anything constructive would mean battling past the opposition of a lot of interests, not least the USAF. And even if it would all, it seemed, have to be a race against time, ensuring that whatever was set up was in place before Congressman Xavier Maclachlan became President and had a chance to shoot it in the head …

It was a hell of a challenge. But suddenly dreams like Rosenberg’s didn’t seem so remote. Suddenly she was in a position to move proposals like that out of the realms of thought experiments, even make them happen.

They emerged into the bright sunlight of the field beyond the wood. In the distance, the children continued to play, their calls rising to the sky.

For the first time since hitting the dirt at Edwards, she felt her pulse pick up a beat of excitement.

She said to Hadamard, ‘I’ll do the job.’ But, she thought, maybe not the way you expect me to.

On Monday morning she moved into her new office at JSC. She called in her secretary and asked him to set up a series of meetings. George, a sombre but competent young man with his hair woven into tight plaits, took notes and began his work.

She needed a team. So she made a list for George: Marcus White, the stranded Moonwalker; Barbara Fahy, the woman who had tried to bring Columbia home; the young Station astronauts Mott and Libet; Bill Angel, the nearest thing to a competent pilot she knew. And Isaac Rosenberg, the dreamer, the crazy man who wanted to go to Titan.

George went off to set up meetings.

After a few minutes, she called him back in.

‘Look, George, things are going to start popping around here,’ she said. ‘I can’t tell you what it is right now, but I want you to keep a log of the people I talk to. And keep it in a secure directory.’

After all, she reflected, they could be making history here, in the next few weeks and months. Maybe historians of the future would care enough to understand how this decision had come about.

Or, she thought in her gloomier moments, not.

George seemed intrigued, but complied without questioning.

She got to work.

Rosenberg called Paula from Hobby Airport, ten miles south-east of downtown Houston. His plane, from Pasadena, had landed a half-hour late, after four in the afternoon.

‘Get a cab to JSC,’ she told him. ‘I’ll pick you up in my car at security.’

Rosenberg hadn’t been out this way before. He stood waiting by the security gate on NASA Road One, staring with undisguised curiosity at the ageing black-and-white buildings.

From JSC she drove east with the home-bound rush-hour traffic, further out from Houston, heading for Clear Lake.

Benacerraf said, ‘You ought to do the tourist bit, while you’re here. Space Center Houston. They’ve got a terrific Mars-walk immersive VR. I’m told.’

‘I prefer RL.’

‘RL?’

‘You don’t get online much, do you?’

The road paralleled the north coast of Clear Lake, which was an inlet of Galveston Bay. They passed the glittering tower of the Nassau Bay Hilton, its glass walls coated with softscreen animated posters.

Rosenberg said, ‘We could be anywhere. Any coast area, anywhere. You wouldn’t think –’

‘I know.’ She stared at the shabby roadside buildings, the tough, scrub grass. ‘Erosion runs fast here,’ she said. ‘And now that the space effort is receding –’ and the wilder rumours now were that most of the NASA centers, JSC included, were to be mothballed ‘- all that erosion is going to have a field day. A hundred years from now, JSC will just be a cow pasture again.’

‘But a cow pasture with immersive VR facilities.’

Benacerraf lived in Shorewood Drive, a small road that curved parallel to the shore of Taylor Lake, itself an inlet of Clear Lake. This was the smart residential community called El Lago. Rosenberg stared out the window, without commenting.

She tried to see the little community through his eyes. Home town America, circa 1961: garages and air-conditioners and bicycles and shining lawns, the houses neat and dark with hints of ranch style, or mock Tudor flourishes, or discreet Spanish designs. Uniformly ersatz. Even the trees were all the same age, she realized now.

Give it up, Benacerraf. He’s probably thinking how much he needs to pee. El Lago is a dormitory for the Space Age, planned and artificial, no more, no less.

They reached her home. There were four other cars already parked in a ragged row along the side of the road: her other guests, arrived ahead of her, the rest of her team.

She observed Rosenberg sizing up the house.

It was a ranch house, an individually styled bungalow, wood framed with stone cladding. The trees, pine and fern, looked manicured. The lawn was luminous green in the last light of the sun, its little sprinkler heads glittering. At the back of the house was a small private jetty, with space for a couple of boats.

‘Nice,’ Rosenberg said neutrally.

She searched for her key. ‘Astronaut country, 1960s style. Nice if you come from Illinois. Or if you like the water.’

‘And you don’t?’

She shrugged. ‘I prefer Seattle. And I don’t sail. Anyhow this is rental only.’

‘Smart.’

‘Yes. Property prices have been falling like crazy around here, ever since Columbia.’

She fired the key’s infra-red beam at the door, and it swung open with a soft hiss of hydraulics.

Benacerraf’s housekeeper, Kevin, had let the rest of her guests in. When Benacerraf and Rosenberg arrived, the housekeeper served them drinks and began to lay out dinner.

The guests were gathered in the gazebo. It was a new kind of conservatory, connected to the house by a flexible joint, and mounted on a platform. It rotated to follow the sun, flower-like.

Rosenberg seemed to love it. ‘Bradbury,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘Never mind. It’s just very appropriate.’

Everyone had turned up, Benacerraf noted with satisfaction: seven of them – Benacerraf herself with Rosenberg, Marcus White, Bill Angel, Barbara Fahy, and the two younger astronauts Benacerraf didn’t know so well, Siobhan Libet and Nicola Mott.

Marcus White grinned at Benacerraf. He was working through seven and sevens, and he looked oiled already. He grinned at Rosenberg, around a mouthful of peanuts, and the room’s candlelight caught the silvery stubble on his creased cheeks.

‘So, Rosenberg. You’re the asshole who wants to go to Titan. Why the hell?’

Rosenberg didn’t seem awed; he looked back levelly, holding his drink up before him. ‘Suppose,’ he said, ‘you tell me why you want to go.’

White snorted.

‘He has a point, Marcus.’ Benacerraf had already outlined the purpose of the dinner party. ‘Rosenberg thinks Titan is El Dorado, a treasure house of exotic chemicals, even life. But what about you? You wouldn’t be here if you weren’t interested yourself.’

White looked fleetingly embarrassed. To cover, he shovelled more peanuts into his mouth. ‘What the hell,’ he said, his lips shiny with grease. ‘If this comes off, it’s the first human flight beyond low Earth orbit since Apollo 17. And probably the last. Who wouldn’t want to go?’

‘Then there’s your reason,’ Bill Angel said. ‘Titan as Everest. We should go because it’s there. Why the hell not?’ Benacerraf watched him drain his glass again, his hand like a claw on the frosted surface.

She didn’t need to ask why Angel 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 that, if we aren’t prepared to put ourselves on the line, give up a few home comforts?’ He sounded irritated, frustrated at his inability to communicate, their inability to see. ‘We go out there to stay for years, we build a home, we survive until a retrieval capability is put together. We cannibalize the ship that carries us, turn it into surface shelters. We use ISRU, as Siobhan says. We make Titan such an attractive place that resupply and retrieval missions have to follow.’

Marcus White said, ‘ “We”, Rosenberg?’

‘Yes.’ He looked uncomfortable, the candlelight shining from his glasses. ‘If there’s a ship going to Titan, I want to be on it. I’m best qualified. Isn’t that what this is all about?’

White grinned. ‘Hell, yes. I’d go myself.’

In the silence that followed, the others stared at him.

‘When I walked on that lava plain south of Copernicus, with Tom Lamb, I sure as hell never figured I’d only get the one shot at it. There would have been an extended-Apollo program, with lunar orbital missions, and long-stay shelters hauled up by dual-launched Saturn Vs, and all the rest. And then more: flyby flights to Venus and Mars, the space station, permanent colonies on the Moon, eventually landing flights to Mars itself …

‘But the whole damn thing shut down, even before Armstrong stepped out at Tranquillity.’ He put down his drink, and the fingers of his big hands knitted together, restless. ‘I must have talked about my Moon trip a thousand times. Ten thousand. And the one thing I’ve never managed to put over is how it feels not to be able to get back. Ever.’ He grinned at Benacerraf, embarrassed, uneasy. ‘They should shoot us poor fucking Moonwalkers in the head. Anyhow, it won’t be me. I realize that. Christ, I’m seventy-four years old, already. I’m a grandpa three times over. But I’ll tell you, I’d just like to see one more guy lift off out of the gravity well and go someplace – plant Old Glory on one more moon – before the last of us sad old Apollo geezers dies of old age.’

‘And,’ Mott pressed, ‘if we don’t succeed? – if Earth doesn’t jump for the bait? If we set out, and they just let the space facilities rust? What then?’

Marcus White leaned toward Mott over the table. ‘The question for you is, having heard that – would you go?’

Mott thought for a moment. She opened her mouth.

But, Benacerraf noted, she didn’t immediately say no.

White leaned back. ‘You know, they used to ask us a question like that, during our interviews for the Astronaut Office. Marcus, would you submit to a two-year journey to Mars? Suppose I tell you that the chances of surviving the trip are one in two. Do you go? Absolutely not, said I. One in ten, maybe.’ He looked at Mott. ‘I got it right. The point was partly to see how dumb I was, how foolhardy. But also to find out if I had it in me.’

‘What?’

‘Wanderlust.’

Rosenberg said, ‘Being an astronaut on this mission won’t be just another job, a line on your résumé. This will be about going somewhere, where nobody else has ever been. Making a difference. What the job used to be about.’

White laughed. ‘That,’ he said, ‘and glory, and fast cars, and the women.’

‘I get it,’ Siobhan Libet said. ‘This isn’t Apollo. It’s a Mayflower option.’

‘Maybe,’ Barbara Fahy murmured. ‘The Mayflower colonists went because they had to. They did it because they couldn’t find a place to fit, at home.’

Marcus White grunted. ‘There sure as hell has been little enough room on Earth for astronauts, since 1972.’

Rosenberg said, ‘The costs don’t have to defeat us. We don’t need any massive technical development. We use chemical propulsion, existing technology wherever possible. For instance, the Space Station hab module for the journey shelter.’

Benacerraf nodded confirmation of that. ‘The thing’s been sitting in a hangar at Boeing, intact, since 1999. It wouldn’t take much modification …’

Rosenberg said, ‘You’d wrap a cut-down Shuttle orbiter around it. With the hab module in the cargo bay, you’d use the orbiter’s OMS and RCS for course corrections, and the main engines for the interplanetary injections.’

Angel and White exchanged glances.

White said, ‘A Shuttle orbiter to Saturn? Well, why the hell not? It’s the nearest thing to a spaceship we got.’ He turned to Rosenberg, grinning. ‘You know, I love the way you think.’

Angel said, ‘How are you going to get a Space Station hab module down to the surface of Titan?’

‘Easy,’ Rosenberg said, chewing. ‘Titan has a thick atmosphere, and a low gravity. You’d glide the hab module down, inside your Shuttle orbiter. Which is why you’d take the orbiter. The aerosurfaces would need some modification, but –’

‘Holy shit,’ Libet said. ‘You’ve worked this out. You’re serious, aren’t you, kid?’

Angel said, ‘Okay, so this is just a mind game, right? A bull session. Maybe you’re right, Rosenberg. Maybe you could do that quickly and cheaply. But not if you wanted a man-rated system.’

Siobhan Libet said, ‘But we aren’t talking about the kind of assured safety we have in the current program, Bill. We know this whole thing would be risky as hell.’

Bill Angel said curtly, ‘I’m talking about some kind of entry profile that would actually be survivable.’

‘It wouldn’t have to be,’ Rosenberg said.

Marcus White groaned and helped himself to some more wine. ‘Oh, shit,’ he said. ‘He has another idea.’

‘Send the orbiter down to Titan unmanned,’ Rosenberg said. ‘Then it can land as hard as you like.’

‘And what about the crew?’ Angel said.

‘All you need is a couple of simple man-rated entry capsules,’ Rosenberg said. ‘Remember, we aren’t talking about any kind of ascent-to-orbit capability; it’s a one-way trip.’ He grinned. ‘You still aren’t thinking big enough, Bill.’

‘And you,’ Angel snapped back, ‘are talking out of your ass. An entry capsule like that is still a billion-dollar development. We just don’t have that kind of resource.’

Rosenberg looked flustered, and Benacerraf realized that for the first time he didn’t have an answer.

She felt an immense sadness descend on her. Is it possible that this is the hole that destroys the proposal? That, after all, it ends here?

How sad. It was a beautiful dream, while it lasted.

They argued for a while, about requirements and likely costs. It started to get heated, with gestures illustrated by pointed chopsticks. Barbara Fahy held her hands up, palms outward. ‘Hold it,’ she said. ‘I hate to say it, but I think I have a solution.’

Benacerraf frowned. ‘Tell me.’

Fahy looked around the table. ‘We use the most advanced entry capsules we ever built. Apollo Command Modules.’

Marcus White was laughing. ‘Oh, man. That is outrageous. Just fucking outrageous. It’s beautiful. Man, I love it.’

Fahy said, ‘All you’d have to do is refurbish the interior, maybe fix up the heatshield, reconfigure for a Titan entry profile.’

Benacerraf said, ‘Marcus, where’s the old Apollo hardware now?’

White was trying to be serious, but grins kept busting out over his face. ‘There were three series of Command Modules: boiler-plates, Block Is and Block IIs. The Block IIs flew all the manned missions; they contained most of the post-fire modifications. The Block IIs is what you’d want to use.’ He closed his eyes. ‘As I recall, Rockwell built twenty-five Block II CMs in all. Okay. Of those twenty-five ships, eleven flew on the Apollo Moon program. Three more flew manned Skylab missions, and one flew on ASTP. Fifteen, right?’

‘Where are they?’ Benacerraf asked. ‘Museums? Could we refurbish an Apollo that’s already been flown?’

Angel frowned. ‘I don’t see how. Those things were pretty much beat up by the time they were recovered. You got the ablation of the heatshield, thermal stresses throughout the structure, salt-water damage from the ocean recovery. The heatshield alone would be a hell of a reconstruction job.’

Benacerraf said, ‘Marcus, what happened to the ten spares? Do you remember?’

‘I sure do,’ he said ruefully. ‘Since they symbolized my career, as it went down the toilet, I followed the fate of those Moon ships with close interest.’ He closed his eyes. ‘They used four for various tests: thermal vacuum and pogo, acoustic, pad checkout. And another three for Skylab tests. They pretty much took those babies apart, for the purposes of the tests.’

‘That leaves three,’ Angel said evenly.

‘Yeah. First you got a Skylab backup. It sat on the pad on top of a Saturn IB as a rescue capability, through the whole Skylab program. And then there were two Moon-trip Apollos, never flown. “Requirement deleted”. Three man-rated spacecraft, never flown, just mothballed.’

Benacerraf felt herself smile. ‘Maybe we’re about to undelete those requirements.’

There was another moment of silence.

Then they started to talk at once. ‘Where are those CMs?’ ‘All in storage at JSC, or Downey.’ ‘Three CMs. Two flight birds and one test vehicle, for verifying the redesign and refurbishment.’ ‘The electronics should be easy. Those old clunky guidance computers they had took up so much damned room. All that core rope and shit …’

Benacerraf let it run on.

It’s coming together, she thought. She felt a core of excitement gather in her gut.

Angel, still drinking hard, was doodling spacecraft configurations and shapes on a smoothed-out paper napkin. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘If we’re going to do this one-way shot, we ought to get away with a fuel load, in Earth orbit, of one and a half million pounds. And of that, around two hundred thousand pounds would be hauled out to Saturn for braking there.’

‘That,’ said Benacerraf, ‘is less than a single Shuttle External Tank.’

‘Yeah,’ White growled. ‘But you’re still looking at a couple of dozen Shuttle flights to put it up there.’

Siobhan Libet said, ‘But you wouldn’t need to use the full Shuttle system. You’re not carrying crew, except on one final flight to orbit.’

Benacerraf prompted, ‘So what do we do instead?’

‘Shuttle-C,’ said Libet promptly. ‘A stripped-down cargo-carrying variant of the Shuttle system. The payload capacity would be raised to a hundred and seventy thousand pounds.’

Mott nodded. ‘But the Shuttle-C is an expendable variant. Essentially you’d be using up the orbiter fleet.’

‘But that doesn’t matter,’ Libet said.

‘She’s right,’ White said. ‘Nicola, we’re working to different rules now. The damn things wouldn’t fly again anyhow. It’s a choice of putting them to work one last time, or stick ’em out in the rain as monuments.’

‘Okay. But even so this is only a partial solution,’ Angel said. ‘We have three orbiters left: Endeavour, Atlantis, Discovery. You’d want to retain one for the final crew launch, so you’re left with two Shuttle-C launches. That would only account for a quarter, maybe, of the total mass in LEO for Titan.’

Libet said, ‘There were two more pre-flight orbiters.’

‘Yes,’ said Benacerraf. ‘Enterprise and Pathfinder. Now, what the hell happened to them?’ She went to a bookcase, and searched through her yellowing Shuttle training materials. ‘Here we go. “Shuttle Orbiter Enterprise: Orbiter Vehicle-101. Enterprise, the first Space Shuttle orbiter, was originally to be named Constitution, for the Bicentennial. However, Star Trek viewers started a write-in campaign urging the White House to rename the vehicle to Enterprise… blah blah … OV – 101 was rolled out of Rockwell’s Air Force Plant 42, Site I –”’

White shrugged. ‘They used Enterprise for the approach and landing tests. Then they decided it would cost too much to upgrade Enterprise for spaceflight. Tough on all those propeller-head Star Trek fans. So they stripped her. She’s a museum piece now.’

Libet asked, ‘What about Pathfinder?’

Benacerraf dug through her documents. “‘The Pathfinder Shuttle Test Article … Pathfinder is a seventy-five ton orbiter simulator that was created to work out the procedures for moving and handling the Shuttle. It was a steel structure roughly the size, weight and shape of an orbiter … Pathfinder was returned to Marshall and now is on permanent display at the Alabama Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville –”’

Libet said, ‘I imagine Pathfinder would be a lot more problematic to adapt for Shuttle-C than Enterprise, or the flight orbiters. But if we can do it –’

‘Then,’ Barbara Fahy said, ‘you’d have four Shuttle-Cs. But they still aren’t enough.’

‘No.’ Angel scratched numbers quickly on his napkin. ‘We still need twice the carrying capacity. What else?’

‘The Energiya,’ Rosenberg said. ‘The old Soviet heavy-lift booster. How about that? What was its lifting capacity?’

‘Three hundred thousand pounds to LEO,’ Angel said.

‘So,’ Rosenberg said, ‘two or three Energiya launches –’

‘I don’t think it would work,’ Siobhan Libet said. ‘I’m sorry.’ Benacerraf could see she was genuinely regretful. ‘I was shown around the Energiya facilities at Tyuratam when I was training for Soyuz Station return. Actually the Energiya facility was built on the site of their old N – 1 launch facility, the Soviets’ attempt at a lunar-mission heavy-lift booster. The Russians have killed it. The integration hall is – spectral. Full of mothballed strap-on boosters, tanks, engines, other Energiya components, pretty much deteriorated; I don’t think it could be refurbished.’

‘Damn waste of time and money,’ White said. ‘I once saw one of their Shuttle flight models. They’ve set it up in Gorky Park, for kids to play at being astronauts.’

Angel blew out his cheeks. ‘So we’re stuck again. What else?’

‘We could go to the Air Force,’ Siobhan Libet said. ‘Use their heavy-lift boosters, the new Delta IVs.’

Benacerraf shook her head. ‘We could try an approach, but they wouldn’t buy it. Believe me, I’ve seen enough politics since Columbia. The USAF will hinder us, not cooperate. Anyhow, Delta can’t lift more than forty thousand pounds to LEO. The number of launches required would be prohibitive.’

‘Then we’re screwed,’ Angel said. He threw his pen down on the table, and crumpled up his napkin.

But Marcus White was grinning. He scratched his cheek; the stubble made a rasping noise against his fingernails. ‘Lawn ornaments,’ he said.

Angel, his arms folded, looked at him. ‘What?’

‘You know, there are NASA centers with Moon rockets lying around on their driveways, for dumb fucking kids to gawp at. JSC, Kennedy, Michoud, Marshall. Now, what if –’

‘You’re kidding,’ Angel said.

‘I’m only talking about refurbishing the existing flight hardware, and a few test engines, not reviving the whole damn production line. All you’d have to do is bring the things in from the rain, scrape off the moss, give them a fresh lick of paint … I know they have some engines in bonded storage, down at Michoud. And I’ll bet there are still a few of those old bastards around who worked on the original development in the 1960s.’

Barbara Fahy frowned. ‘I guess it could be done. The old launch complexes at the Cape, 39-A and 39-B, are still operational. They were adapted for Shuttle.’

‘Then they can be unadapted,’ White snapped back.

Angel was figuring. ‘So to complement our four Shuttle-C launches, and allowing a margin for boiloff, assembly equipment – we’d need four launches.’

‘And four birds,’ White said, ‘is what we got, lying around.’ He counted on his fingers. ‘There are two operational articles – AS – 514 and – 515, from the deleted Moon flights – at JSC and Michoud. Then you have two test articles, AS – 500D and – 500T, at Marshall and Kennedy. I guess bringing them up to specification would be more of a challenge, but I bet it could be done.’ White looked triumphant, somehow vindicated, Benacerraf thought. ‘I’d love to see those birds fired off at last, after all these years. The idea of those spaceships just lying around in the rain has always bugged me …’

‘And if we can do that,’ Angel said, ‘then it’s feasible. We have enough heavy-lift capability.’ He looked at Rosenberg and laughed. ‘Good grief, Rosenberg. I think we’ve done it; we’ve found a way to close the design.’

Libet looked confused, as this talk swirled around her. ‘What are you talking about?’

Mott took her hand and squeezed it gently. ‘Saturn Vs,’ she said. ‘They’re talking about flying Saturn Vs again …’

‘Oh,’ said Libet. ‘Oh, my God.’

They talked on, debating details and approaches, as the candles burned steadily down.

The one topic they never approached – as if skirting around it – was the risk.

If the risk of not returning from an Apollo flight had been something like one in ten – and most engineers agreed the risk on Shuttle was around one in a hundred – and given the distances and the extent of this venture outside of the experience base and the difficulty of maintaining political will behind a project spanning so many years – what was the risk of not returning from Titan?

A lot worse than fifty-fifty, Benacerraf thought. Each of them, here, was signing up for Russian roulette, with the barrels loaded against them. And each of them had to know that.

But they were prepared to go anyhow. They all had to be crazy, by any conventional definition.

They were a motley crew, Benacerraf thought: Rosenberg the dreamer, Fahy the tough, wounded engineer, Angel the burned-up, goal-oriented drinker, White the stranded Moonwalker, Libet and Mott younger, enigmatic, but still, she sensed, touched with the wanderlust. And herself: determined to do something with the rest of her life other than just survive Columbia.

Flawed people, all of them. And not one of them had anything to live for that was more meaningful than dreams of a jaunt to Titan.

Maybe that was necessary; maybe it had always been true. Who else would go on such a mission? Nobody happy with her life, that was for sure.

And who would come up with such a vision, she thought, but a misfit like Rosenberg? Rosenberg, with his sense of his place in the cosmos – a sense of depth, change, flux – that sense that he doesn’t belong here, that he’s a mere conduit of celestial matters and forces …

Yeah. A better sense of the Universe than of what’s going on in the heads of his fellow human beings.

Maybe NASA had been wise, all these years, to neglect the psychology of its space travellers. Maybe that was the only possible approach. In this room alone there was probably enough material for a three-day shrinks’ conference.

But what the hell. All that mattered was that she had her team.

And it was some dream. With a colony on Titan – even one scraping a precarious living from the slush – it just wouldn’t be possible for the folks here at home to slump back into some kind of flat-Earth mentality. The Universe would always be alive, with humans living on an island up in the sky.

Maybe, she thought, Rosenberg is single-handedly saving the future.

Now, she thought wryly, all they had to do was convince NASA, the Government, and the rest of the goddamn human race to let them do this. The real work started here.

Kevin, the housekeeper, came in to clear up the dishes and deliver coffee and more drinks. Benacerraf watched him as he worked, the heady talk of Titan and Shuttle-Cs and Apollos flowing around him. Kevin’s smooth, moonlike face was blank, incurious; Benacerraf doubted he heard a word that was said.

He had a new image-tattoo on his forehead, Benacerraf saw. The lozenge-shaped patch of glowing photochemicals cycled through images of smoky star-clusters, evidently downloaded from one of the Hubble picture libraries.

She found she’d made her decision.

Here, in this room, she thought, it starts. And it won’t end until we land on Titan.

As he left, Marcus White winked at Benacerraf. ‘Everest, El Dorado, Mayflower. I don’t know whether we’re going to Titan or not, or why the hell. But you sure do throw one great party, kid.’

The first task was to flesh out the mission profile.

Benacerraf set Barbara Fahy working on the feasibility of adapting mission control software and techniques to handle the Saturn and Shuttle-C launches, and the extended mission profile after that.

She quickly came back to Benacerraf with a schedule and costing. Fahy had shown how STS mission control techniques could be adapted with a little effort to run Shuttle-C and revived Saturn programs. Then, looking ahead for a feasible way to run a manned mission to Saturn, Fahy argued that you didn’t want to have a full team of controllers employed for all six or eight or ten years. Fahy’s projection showed how a scaled-down Mission Control operation would suffice to run the flight itself after the initial interplanetary injection sequence; hands-off techniques developed to run extended Earth-orbit operations aboard Station could be adapted. It would be necessary to rehire staff or attach contract workers during the later crucial mission phases, like a Jupiter encounter. But it could all be done for a containable cost.

Benacerraf was working to a timetable she hadn’t yet shared with many people. And to her, the setup schedule even for this ground-based aspect of the mission looked tight. But then, everything would be tight, pushing against the clock, until the last Shuttle lifted off the pad …

Benacerraf worked through Fahy’s case carefully.

Barbara Fahy was almost pathetically eager to work on this proposal, to find some way of redeeming her self-respect after being lead Flight on Columbia. It seemed to do no good to point out that Fahy was not responsible for the hardware and testing flaws that had led to the orbiter’s destruction, that no blame had been attached to her – that, in fact, her career had been done no perceptible damage at all.

As far as Fahy was concerned, it had been her mission. And she’d lost it.

Still, her judgement was unimpaired; her work on this issue looked good.

Benacerraf accepted the recommendation, but a seed of doubt lodged in her mind. A scaled down Mission Control would be fine, but if some kind of Apollo 13 situation blew up, halfway to Jupiter, the crew would need fast backup by experts on the ground: revised procedures, survival techniques, simulator proving … there mightn’t be time to hire up and train the people needed.

Anyhow, with that basic framework in hand, Barbara Fahy called in the senior members of her control team, and, with Benacerraf, talked them through the proposed flight.

They listened in silence – stunned, frightened silence, Benacerraf thought.

If NASA sent a spacecraft to Saturn, it would be these young, smart people – or their peers – who would have the responsibility for seeing that all the burns happened at the right times, for the right durations, with the spacecraft in the right attitudes; they would have to oversee navigation all the way to Titan, and prepare abort contingency plans.

There was a lot of scepticism. Even hostility. ‘How do you think we’re gonna do this?’ ‘We can’t possibly. All our systems are designed for low Earth orbit missions.’ ‘How can you think –’

Fahy knew her people, however, and she let them run down. ‘Just chew it over for a few days,’ she told them. ‘You don’t have to come up with all the answers at once. And talk to people. Talk to the Apollo old-timers, about the problems of deep space manned missions. Talk to the guys at JPL, about interplanetary navigation techniques. I know it’s one hell of a challenge, guys, the biggest since Apollo –’

‘But,’ said one languid young man – introduced by Fahy as Gary Munn – ‘those 1960s guys could look forward to some kind of career within NASA. More than one mission, a future. Not just a one-off stunt like this.’

Fahy glared at him. ‘We’re talking about going to Saturn, for God’s sake. The greatest adventure in human history. A journey that will be talked about as long as mankind survives. An exploration that even eclipses Armstrong’s. Don’t you care about being a part of that?’

But Munn just stared back, his expression unreadable to Benacerraf.

I really don’t understand this new generation, she thought.

After a couple of days, Benacerraf had Fahy and her planners host a wider meeting at which the details of the mission were explored. Big, powerful suites of trajectory-mapping software – primed with precise predictions of the planets’ positions for decades to come – were deployed by the planners, running through option after option, with mission duration and initial mass in Earth orbit numbers scrolling over spread-out softscreens.

The programs soon converged on an optimal trajectory. It was essentially similar to the complex path taken by Cassini to make the same trip, with the early part of the trajectory wrapped around the inner planets, slingshots off Earth and Venus, before unwinding towards the outer Solar System, and a final gravity assist from Jupiter. The meeting argued around the details and parameters, before settling on a recommendation:

To launch in January, 2008.

It would be, Benacerraf realized, one hell of a tight development schedule. Maybe even unachievable.

But it fit her internal timetable. It would be a whole year before Maclachlan was scheduled to take office and ground everything, and only a year for the bad guys in the USAF and beyond to find a way to close down NASA, and maybe not so far in the future that all of the current post-Chinese push back into space had worn off.

There really was no choice. The window of opportunity was closing quickly. If Americans were going to travel beyond the Moon, it would have to be in 2008. Or never.

Benacerraf studied the smooth trajectory curves scrolling across the softscreens. ‘We understand this stuff so well,’ she said to Fahy. ‘It’s astonishing how quickly we can produce material like this.’

‘Oh, yes,’ Barbara Fahy said sourly. ‘Our civilization has become expert at interplanetary navigation. It’s just that we’ve chosen to abandon the capability to do any of it.’

‘Actually,’ Gary Munn said brightly, ‘we can run the projections forward and back. Even as far back as the 1960s there were proposals to slingshot off Venus and fly to Mars, and so forth, in the near future of the time; it’s interesting to move the planets back to their configurations, in 1982 or 1986, and see how accurately those old guys got their predictions.’ He worked his keypad briskly, and Benacerraf watched trajectory curves wrap around the sun, depicting the paths of spacecraft that never were, travelling to Mars in 1982 and 1986 and 1992.

To Benacerraf, this precise, beautiful, useless rendering of all those lost missions was painful, almost physically.

Munn whistled as he worked the programs.

Benacerraf called in Mal Beardsley, her assistant program manager responsible for flight safety.

Mal was a bluff old-timer who had come in from solid-booster supplier Morton Thiokol after the Challenger accident, and he thought she was crazy. They spent a half-hour Benacerraf couldn’t really afford debating the pros and cons of the mission.

Beardsley left the room, grinning and tapping his greying temple. It was a reaction that Benacerraf figured she was going to have to get used to, and she forced a smile.

Still, Beardsley had a report in her softscreen within two days.

Beardsley had tried to devise abort options for the Titan mission.

A key objective in NASA mission planning had always been to provide abort options. And that philosophy had borne a lot of fruit. Even the use of the Lunar Module as a lifeboat, after the Apollo 13 Service Module was crippled, had been practised on an earlier flight. After Challenger, many more abort possibilities were built into the Shuttle mission profile, particularly the ascent phase. It all increased the survivability of the flights, on paper and in practice.

The flight to Earth orbit would be no real problem; standard Shuttle abort modes would be sufficient. And after the Titan ship left orbit, firing up its Shuttle main engines, abort options were still available: for instance, if the main engines malfunctioned, they could be shut down and the smaller OMS and RCS engines used to bring the craft around a huge U-turn and back to Earth. That would work up to a point, anyhow. Once the main engines had burned for long enough to apply more delta-vee than the OMS and RCS could compensate for, the crew would be committed to an interplanetary flight of some kind. But even here, aborts were possible. The craft could modify its trajectory and slingshot around Venus, back to an early rendezvous with Earth. Even a slingshot back home around Jupiter would be possible.

Of course the problems of reentry from such an interplanetary jaunt would be formidable. Beardsley figured that the Apollo Command Modules, which had been built to withstand a direct entry into Earth’s atmosphere from the Moon, would be the most survivable possibility for the crew, and he recommended strongly against weakening the Apollos’ heatshields.

It would be one hell of an abort, however, Benacerraf reflected: the round trip to Venus or Jupiter would take months, even years, during which time the crew would presumably be struggling to survive in a crippled ship.

Past Jupiter, even Beardsley could find no meaningful aborts.

She started to make contacts with other senior NASA managers.

One of the first was with the JSC director, a tough, cost-conscious woman in her sixties called Millie Rimini. Benacerraf walked up two flights of stairs to Rimini’s office, and took in Barbara Fahy to give her pitch more technical plausibility.

Rimini’s job, as Benacerraf understood it, was – post-Columbia – to manage the rundown of JSC, to complete a part of Hadamard’s greater mission. So Benacerraf pitched the Titan mission as part makework, part cosmetic. Maybe the mission would actually save some jobs, at JSC. At worst, it would create a buzz of enthusiasm and raise morale; being able to work on a new program would sweeten the pill, for many, of the transfers and early retirements and layoffs that were to come. And so on. And the same applied to all the NASA centers.

Benacerraf had run big-budget engineering projects before; she knew how these things worked. People weren’t usually selfless; people sought to achieve their own personal goals, and treated projects as an arena in which to achieve those goals. In successful projects, the goals of the key players were in line with those of the project. Thus, managers like Rimini had to see benefits for themselves in the proposal, ways they could use it to achieve their own objectives, even as the Shuttles lifted off for Saturn. It was up to Benacerraf to figure out those benefits and present them.

It took a morning to convince Rimini that they should work seriously on this.

After that, Rimini encouraged Benacerraf to take the proposal to a wider group of NASA managers. Rimini set up a meeting at Marshall Spaceflight Center, in Alabama, of senior officials from Houston, the Cape, and Marshall, and from relevant NASA internal divisions. Rimini chaired the meeting.

Benacerraf was surprised to meet some opposition from the hard-line space buffs in some of the centers. The Cape managers, primed by a sweet-talk approach by Marcus White, could see no show-stopper obstacles to refurbishing a Saturn launch complex, given the time and money. And the Shuttle-C flights would just be variants on STS launch procedures they’d already run a hundred and forty-three times – simplified variants, at that. But the old guys from Marshall, with their tough, conservative, confrontational approach to engineering that dated all the way back to Wernher von Braun, were more resistant. This stuff is only one chart deep, she was told. This is all way outside the experience base. Going to Saturn with chemical technology is a spectacularly dumb thing to do. What we have to do is revive the NERVA fission rocket program, and launch a set of nuclear stages into orbit in Shuttle orbiters, and, and …

It wasn’t hard to point out that nobody was going to endorse putting a nuclear rocket through the dangers of a Shuttle launch. Or, come to that, any near-future successor to the Shuttle. And besides, a program like NERVA, shut down in 1970, would cost billions to revive, if you were going to do it cleanly.

It was true. Going to Saturn with chemical was a dumb thing to do, dumb almost to the point of infeasibility. Like exploring Antarctica in a skiff. But it was the only boat leaving port, for the foreseeable future.

Slowly the Marshall people came round.

They all agreed to work on the proposal some more; it wasn’t yet time, they concurred, to take this to Jake Hadamard.

The work went on, sometimes around the clock. Benacerraf asked Millie Rimini to chair a critical review of the proposal, at JSC. It took two days of intensive briefings. Benacerraf had steeled herself to play devil’s advocate if she had to, to make sure all the tough questions were asked and answered. She found it wasn’t necessary; there was more than enough scepticism in the air, and the two days were long and hard.

Even so, the conclusion was that there was no technical obstacle to the Saturn flight.

Still Benacerraf wasn’t satisfied.

She had Beardsley run another safety review of the proposal, and she held a further briefing with senior Shuttle program executives and representatives of the principal contractors. Later, Rimini hosted a NASA management meeting at NASA Headquarters in Washington, to go over everything one more time. Then Benacerraf held a series of smaller, informal meetings with her key players, rehearsing and rehashing the arguments …

And on, and on.

Through all this, Benacerraf planned and replanned her campaign. It was going to take eighteen months, of figuring and investigating and re-evaluating. And all the time she was consciously building momentum, the Big Mo, behind her plan, working to persuade people that, yes, they could do this thing – that they should do this thing. If NASA could send Apollo 8 around the Moon on the first manned Saturn V, then surely, after five decades of spaceflight, it could assemble the will for this one last effort …

On the whole, the response was good. But then, she hadn’t yet attempted to take the proposal outside NASA’s inner circles. And – ageing and stale as they might be – most people who worked for NASA, even now, were pretty much space nuts.

NASA insiders were just the type to love crazy ideas like going to Titan. And NASA’s overenthusiasm had, she knew, caused a kind of collective lapse in good political judgement many times before. NASA insiders had a vision that the rest of the world, she told herself brutally, generally didn’t share.

And, she thought, nor did Jake Hadamard, which was why he had been appointed.

She knew that Hadamard would perceive grave risks, for the Agency and himself, in taking such an extravagant option. Giving the Shuttle orbiters to the Navy for gunnery practice was cheaper, and would cost no lives. And if failure were to come, she knew that the reaction would be that anyone should have known better than to undertake such a hubristic mission.

It would be Hadamard who would have to answer such charges. Working out her approach to Hadamard was the key part of Benacerraf’s planning.

She moved a camp bed into her office at JSC. Sometimes, she didn’t go home to Clear Lake for days on end.