Saturn Page 11

  "There are too many controls," Eberly repeated. "Back on Earth, with a global population climbing well past ten billions despite the greenhouse warming and all the other ecological disasters, tight control is very necessary. But this is not Earth."

  Wilmot pretended surprise. "Don't you believe that we must regulate our population size? Don't you understand the need to mete out our resources according to our ability to replenish them? We live in a very limited environment, you know."

  Obviously struggling to contain his impatience, Eberly said, "This habitat could feed and house ten times the existing population. Why must we behave as if we are on the brink of famine?"

  "Because we will be on the brink of famine if we don't control population size," Wilmot replied mildly.

  Eberly shook his head vigorously. "You assume that we are a closed ecology, that we have nothing available to us except what we produce for ourselves."

  "Isn't that the truth?" Wilmot shot back.

  "No! We can trade for resources with the asteroid miners, with the bases on Mars and in Jupiter orbit, with Selene, even."

  "Trade what?" Wilmot asked. "What do we have to trade with?"

  Eberly smiled as if he were turning over his trump card. "We will have the most precious resource of them all: water."

  Wilmot felt his brows go up. "Water?"

  "Saturn is surrounded by massive rings, which are composed of pieces of ice. Water ice. We can become the providers of water for the entire solar system once we reach Saturn."

  "Water," Wilmot repeated, in a near whisper.

  "Water," Eberly said again. "And fusion fuels, too. Once we are in Saturn orbit, it will be cheaper for us to scoop fusion fuels from the planet's atmosphere than it is to scoop them from Jupiter."

  "But we'll be twice as far from Earth—"

  "I've had experts do the analysis," Eberly said, almost smugly. "You can check the numbers yourself. Once we are in Saturn orbit we can drive the Jupiter operation out of business!"

  "Extraordinary," Wilmot murmured, looking up at the ceiling panels, thinking furiously. "Even if that is a workable proposition," he said, "it will have to wait until we are at Saturn, won't it?"

  "Yes, of course."

  "Then there is no point in trying to alter our system of governance until then, is there?"

  Eberly placed his hands on his thighs and said very reasonably, "The people should be ready to launch into action as soon as we reach Saturn. Why should they delay? They should be free to select the form of government they want, the form that will work best for them, now, while we are in transit, so that the new government can be in place when we get to our destination."

  With you at its head, Wilmot added silently. That's what you're after, isn't it? This is nothing more than a power game. Fascinating.

  Aloud, he said to Eberly, "Perhaps there is some merit in your idea."

  Holly blurted, "You think so?"

  Wilmot smiled at her and said, "Why don't we agree on this: You can start the process of writing a new constitution. Canvass the population and determine what kind of a government they want for themselves. Begin the process immediately."

  "We'll have to poll the people, draw up various types of constitutions, nominate candidates—"

  "Yes, yes," Wilmot said. "Do all that while you're carrying out your little contests about naming things. But there will be no change in our governing regulations until we are firmly established in orbit about Saturn. Is that clear? You can spend the time left in transit to form your new government, but it will not be installed in office until we are at our destination."

  Eberly thought a moment, eyes cast downward, then looked squarely at Wilmot and said, "Yes, I can agree to that."

  "Good," said Wilmot, getting to his feet and extending his hand across the desk. "We are agreed, then."

  Eberly and Holly stood up and shook Wilmot's hand in turn. As they left his office, Wilmot sank back into his chair, thinking that he should write up this encounter and have it ready to send back to Atlanta as quickly as possible.

  DATA BANK

  It is the most beautiful sight in the solar system: Saturn and its glowing, glorious rings.

  They arch above the planet's equator like a bridge of light, circling the ponderous flattened sphere of the planet, hovering above its middle as if in splendid defiance of gravity.

  The second-largest planet of our solar system, Saturn is slightly smaller than Jupiter, but orbits twice as far from the Sun. Like Jupiter, Saturn is a gas giant world, composed almost entirely of the lightest elements, hydrogen and helium. If you could build a swimming pool nearly ten times the size of Earth, Saturn would float in it: the planet's density is slightly less than water's.

  Approaching Saturn, the planet's pale yellow and tan clouds churn across a disc that is noticeably flattened by its frenetic spin rate. Saturn's day is a scant ten hours and thirty-nine minutes. Yet to the ancients, Saturn was the farthest planet they could see, and the slowest in making its way around the sky. At ten times the Earth's distance from the Sun, it takes 29.46 Earth years for Saturn to circle the Sun once.

  The ring system is what makes Saturn so beautiful, so intriguing. Jupiter and the farther worlds of Uranus and Neptune have narrow, faint rings circling them. Saturn has broad bands of rings, shining brilliantly, suspended about the planet's middle, hanging in emptiness like a magnificent set of halos.

  When Galileo first turned his primitive telescope to Saturn he thought he saw a triple planet: His small lenses could not make out the rings, to him they looked like strange ears sprouting on either side of the planet. He wrote to the German astronomer Johannes Kepler a letter in code, so that it could be read only by its intended recipient.

  "I have observed the highest planet to be triple-bodied," Galileo wrote in an anagram. Kepler misunderstood, and thought that Galileo meant he had discovered two moons of Mars.

  As telescopes improved, astronomers discovered those impossible rings. To this day, Saturn is one of the first objects that amateur astronomers turn to. The sight of the ringed planet never fails to inspire admiring, delighted sighs.

  Saturn's beautiful rings are composed of particles of ice and ice-covered dust. While most of the particles are no larger than dust motes, some are as big as houses. The rings are about four hundred thousand kilometers across, yet not much thicker than a hundred meters. They have been described as "proportionally as thick as a sheet of tissue paper spread over a football field."

  The rings' total mass amounts to that of an icy satellite no more than one hundred kilometers in diameter. They are either the remains of one or more moons that got too close to the planet and were broken up by gravitational tidal forces, or leftover material from the time of the planet's formation which never coalesced into a single body because it was too close to Saturn to do so.

  The rings are dynamic. Hundreds of millions of particles circling the mammoth planet, constantly colliding, bouncing off one another, breaking into smaller fragments, banging and jouncing like an insane speedway full of lunatic drivers.

  The dynamics of the rings are fascinating. There are gaps between the major rings, spaces of emptiness caused by the gravitational pulls of Saturn's several dozen moons. The rings are accompanied by tiny "sheepdog" satellites, minuscule moons that circle just outside or just inside each ring and apparently keep them in place with their tiny gravitational influence. The rings are self-sustaining: As particles are sucked down into the planet, new particles are chipped off the shepherd moons by constant collisions with the hurtling, jostling particles, abraded off these tiny moonlets as they grind their way around the planet, constantly bombarded by the blizzard of tiny icy particles through which they orbit.

  The main rings are actually composed of hundreds of thinner ringlets that appear to be braided together. Spacecraft time-lapse photos also show mysterious spokes weaving through the largest of the rings, patterns of light and dark that remain unexplained and fascinating. Perhaps Saturn's extensi
ve magnetosphere electrically charges the dust particles in the ring and levitates them, which may give rise to the spokes.

  The planet itself presented an enigma to the inquisitive scientists from Earth. Like the more massive Jupiter, Saturn is heated from within, its core of molten rock seething from the pressure of the giant world squeezing down upon it. But Saturn is smaller than Jupiter, farther from the Sun, and therefore colder. Where Jupiter harbors a flourishing biosphere of aerial organisms in its thick hydrogen atmosphere, and an even more complex ecology of seagoing creatures in its deep planetwide ocean, Saturn seems bereft of life, except for the cold-adapted microbes that dwell in its upper cloud deck.

  "Saturn is a dead end, as far as multicellular life is concerned," pronounced a disappointed astrobiologist after the earliest probes scanned the vast ocean that swirls beneath the ringed world's perpetual clouds, "just over the edge of habitability for anything more complex than single-celled organisms."

  Wistfully, he added, "Just a little warmer and we would have had a duplicate of Jupiter."

  Among the billions of ice particles that make up the rings, some prebiological chemical activity has been detected by robotic probes, but no evidence for living organisms has been found, as yet.

  Saturn's giant moon, Titan, is an altogether different matter, however. A rich ecology of hydrocarbon-based microbes exists there, placing Titan off-limits for any development or industrial exploitation. No one but scientists are allowed at Titan, and even they have refrained from sending to its surface anything except completely sterilized robot probes.

  The scientific community and the International Astronautical Authority are agreed that humans must not endanger Titan's ecology with the threat of contamination.

  But others do not agree.

  INTRADEPARTMENTAL MEMORANDUM

  TO: All Human Resources Department Personnel.

  FROM: R. Morgenthau, Acting Director.

  SUBJECT: Prayer Meetings.

  Several staff members have asked for a clarification of departmental policy concerning prayer meetings. Although habitat regulations do not specifically call for such meetings during normal working hours, neither do said regulations forbid them.

  Therefore it will be the policy of the Human Resources Department to allow HR staff to conduct prayer meetings during working hours, providing such meetings are cleared beforehand with the Acting Director, and further providing that such meetings are no longer than thirty (30) minutes in duration.

  Staff members are encouraged to attend prayer meetings. The Human Resources Department will, furthermore, encourage all other departments to follow a similar policy. Those who oppose prayer meetings are obviously attempting to impose their secularist opinions on the general population of this habitat.

  R. Morgenthau.

  Acting Director.

  Human Resources Department.

  TIME, TIDES, AND TITAN

  Edouard Urbain imagined himself standing on the shore of Titan's hydrocarbon sea.

  Larger than the planet Mercury, Titan is a cold and dark world, some ten times farther from the Sun than Earth is. Only pale and weak sunlight filters through the clouds and smog of Titan's thick, murky atmosphere.

  Urbain pictured himself standing on an outcropping of ice, staring through his spacesuit helmet's visor at the black, oily sea surging across the rough, jumbled ice field below. In the distance a sooty "snowstorm" was approaching, a wall of black hydrocarbon flakes blotting out the horizon as it came closer.

  Then the bleak, frozen landscape suddenly grew brighter. He looked up, and the breath caught in his throat. The clouds had broken for a moment and he could see Saturn riding high above, magnificently beautiful, ten times larger than a full Moon on Earth, its rings a slim knife edge slicing across the middle of the gaudily striped body of the planet. There is no lovelier sight in the entire solar system, he thought.

  But the tide was coming in. Pulled by the immense gravitational power of Saturn, the hydrocarbon sea was a frothing tidal wave swiftly advancing across the broken landscape of ice, a slimy crawling monster swallowing everything in its path, submerging spires and boulder-sized chunks of ice, covering the frozen ground in hissing, bubbling black oil, flooding the world from horizon to horizon. Soon it would drown even the prominence Urbain was standing on, slithering halfway across Titan before reversing its course.

  Someday I will stand by that sea, Urbain told himself, equipped to sample it and search for living organisms in the black, oily liquid. Someday.

  He sighed and looked around his cramped little office, returning to reality. No one will go to the surface of Titan, not for many years to come, he knew.

  Then his eyes fell on the three-dimensional schematic of the landing vehicle that hovered above his desk. It looked bulky and cumbersome, but to Urbain it was the epitome of pragmatic elegance. You will go down to Titan's surface, my beauty, Urbain said silently to the drawing.

  Designing the lander had been little more than child's play, he realized. It was being built by his engineers and technicians, under his meticulous direction. That much was actually rather simple.

  The big accomplishment was carrying it to Saturn, establishing this habitat in orbit around the ringed planet, where Urbain and his scientists could control the lander in real time.

  Time had defeated earlier attempts to explore Titan remotely. It took more than an hour to send a signal from Earth to Saturn, even when the two planets were at their closest. Remotely-controlled probes failed, no matter how sophisticated they were, because of that time lag. For decades scientists on Earth gnashed their teeth in frustration as one probe after another trundled blithely into a crevasse or was blanketed in oily black snow, simply because it took hours for their human controllers to get the proper commands to them.

  No longer, Urbain told himself. Now we will control the lander from a mere few light-seconds away. If necessary, we can establish a command post in orbit around Titan itself and cut the reaction time to less than a second.

  But no human will set foot on Titan, he knew. Not for many years. The thought saddened him, in his heart of hearts. He wanted to plant his own boots on that cold, dark, black-ice surface. Deep in the place where he kept his most secret desires, Edouard Urbain wanted to be the first man to reach the surface of Titan.

  DEPARTURE Plus 317 Days

  "Jezoo, it's like a movie set down here."

  Holly was leading Manuel Gaeta along the utilities tunnel that ran beneath the village. Overhead lights flicked on automatically as they walked along the tunnel, then went dark again once they had passed. The walls were lined with electrical conduits, plumbing pipes, valves, control panels, phone screens spaced every hundred meters. More pipes ran overhead, color coded blue for potable water, yellow for sewage heading to the recyclers, red for hot water going to the waste heat radiators outside the habitat. The tunnel hummed with the constant throb of pumps and electrical equipment. Holly could feel the metal deck plates vibrating through the soles of her softboots.

  "What's a movie set?" she asked.

  "Where they shoot vids," Gaeta replied, eying all the ductwork around them as they moved along the tunnel. "You know, if they need to do a scene in ancient Rome they build a set to look like ancient Rome."

  "Oh. Sure. I click. But how does this look like a movie set?" He grinned at her. "Like the back side of a set. They're all fake, just a facade, usually made out of plastic. You go behind, it's all propped up with girders and scaffolds."

  "And this reminds you of that?" she asked, puzzled.

  "Kinda," he replied. "I mean, a couple dozen meters over our heads is the village—"

  "No, we're past the village now," Holly corrected. "We're underneath the park, heading for the farms."

  "Whatever. Up top it all looks so real, but down here you realize it's all fakery."

  "It is not!" she said, with some heat. "It's as real as real can be. You eat the food we grow on the farms, don't you? You sleep in an apartment in th
e village. How real can it get?"

  Gaeta held up both hands in a mock surrender. "Hey, whoa. Don't take it so personal. I just meant, this whole habitat is an artificial construction. It looks like a real village and real farms and all that, but when you're down here you realize it's all inside a big machine."

  "Well, f'sure," Holly said. "Everybody knows that."

  They walked in silence for a while, the overhead lights turning on for them and off again once they passed. Like magic, Holly thought. Then she remembered that she should have been in the office, working. But this is fun, she told herself, exploring the tunnels. Why work all the time? A person ought to have a little fun now and then.

  The tunnel branched up ahead, and one wall opened up to reveal another tunnel that crossed theirs at a lower level.

  "This way," Holly said, swinging a leg over the guardrail.

  "Down there?" Gaeta asked.

  "Sure." She flipped over the metal railing, grasped its bottom rung and hung there for an instant, then dropped to the metal flooring of the lower tunnel, four meters below.

  "Come on," Holly called up to Gaeta. "It's a shortcut to the farms."

  He leaned over the rail, looking dubious. Then slowly, methodically, he clambered over the rail and let himself drop down beside her, landing lightly on the balls of his feet.

  "For a stunt guy," she chided, "you're warping cautious."

  "That's how a stunt guy stays in one piece," he replied, grinning. "There are old stuntmen and bold stuntmen, but there are no old, bold stuntmen."

  Holly laughed, understanding.

  "How far to the farms?" Gaeta asked.

  "Not far now."

  "How far?"