The Ice Fields of Titan

The Ice Fields of Titan

by Harold R. Thompson

On Thursday, I called my dad.

“Hey, what’s new?” he said. It was what he always said when I called.

I’d rehearsed my lines, but now I felt that old awkwardness, and all that came out was, “Uh…”

“Have you heard from your sister?” he said, maybe just trying to kickstart the conversation.

It helped.

“Yes, but that’s not why I called. Do you remember that contest I told you about?”

“Contest, contest. Oh, yes, the rocket contest.”

I took a deep breath. He knew I didn’t work on rockets.

“Compression Drive,” I said. “The race to Titan. I mean Saturn’s moon Titan. And back. I was one of three finalists. I mean our company, End Run, for our C-Drive design. Now the three best designs are going to race.”

“Oh, yes, I remember. Sounds like fun. What’s the prize?”

“Contracts, and a lot of them.”

I could have added something about a technological revolution, even a new era for humanity, but none of that really meant anything to me. Not then. I just needed a partner for the race, because that was one of the rules set by the International Association of Space Pioneers, or IASP (pronounced “eye asp”). This would be the first major human trial of the C-Drive, and it was a bit of a publicity stunt, but the IASP wanted to make an impression on the public. Their contest was for the best design, meaning the most efficient, fastest, and safest for public use. The contest rules were simple: build a drive and take a crewed ship to Titan and back. The crew had to be at least two people.

“Well, that’s really great,” Dad said.

“Listen, Dad, I have to take someone with me, and the first person I thought of was you.”

My dad just chuckled, that stiff little laugh of his.

“I’m a little old to train to be an astronaut.”

“You don’t need much training. It’s not a rocket. This is completely new. That’s the whole point. There’s a safety course, mostly about the vehicle itself, but it will only take a few days.”

“Well,” he said. “Well.”

There was a silence. I was afraid he wasn’t sure, or wasn’t up for it. I’d hoped he’d jump at the chance.

“I should have come up there to see you,” I said. “For something this big. I shouldn’t have just called.”

“When is it? You know your mother and I are heading to Florida after Christmas.”

“It’s soon, in November… when the planets are closest.”

I needed to convince him. I’d wanted him to come with me since I’d made the contest short list. I’d thought of the old times when we used to head to our summer cottage together, just two of us, to open it in the spring or shut everything down in the fall. We would always walk the trails, play cards, and have a barbecue. Those were some of the best times we’d ever had together.

“Most of the work is done,” I said. “I just need to pick my crewmate. The entire trip to Titan and back will only be a few hours. I know that sounds crazy, but that’s what we’re dealing with. This is revolutionary.”

There, I’d said it.

“Our system works. Now it’s all about the race… and I thought it would be cool if it was us.”

“Well,” Dad said again. “It could be fun. Send me more details.”

I’d been leaning over my desk, phone pushed against my ear, but suddenly I sat up and swivelled my chair to face the window and the blue sky outside.

“I can come over this weekend,” I said, and I was smiling. “I’ll bring everything then.”

After I’d graduated high school, I’d bounced through a series of jobs and college programs like a pinball, not really sure where I was going to stop. At some point, things became strained between my dad and me. I felt like a loser, that I was letting him down, and that made me angry. Often I projected that anger at my dad.

I was both blessed and cursed with the ability to do many things, and that was part of my problem. But eventually I settled on an idea, and the idea worked, and the fact that it worked encouraged investors, and finally I ended up in charge of my own small aerospace firm.

We’d produced a new kind of spaceship. My current model was named Schuster II. It was a large sphere with a flat bottom, like a sheared cannon ball, and completely black, its surface emitting no light due to its coating of carbon nanotubule “hair”. Looking at it was like staring into a hole. My development team had nicknamed it the Black Ship, but I didn’t like that name, nor did I care for some of the other suggestions they made like Courage and Success. The ship was a happy thing, a good thing, and the happiest thing I’d ever known had been my old dog. My first scale prototype became Schuster I, and its successor Schuster II.

My system worked, but I couldn’t take credit for the principle of Special Compression. I hadn’t won the Nobel Prize for Physics. No, that hadn’t been me. All I’d done was pay attention and get excited when the discovery had been announced. It was another one of those big discoveries that had posed more questions than it had answered, but most big discoveries are like that. They make one overarching fact clearer and clearer: we don’t really know what’s going on. We don’t really know how the universe works. We just catch a glimpse now and then, and then we get another glimpse, and those glimpses are usually enough for engineers to work with. They can be exploited. And that’s just what I did, and my rivals did, with Special Compression.

Special Compression allows for the compression of local spacetime by simulating mass. This means you can build a vehicle that engages a Compression Drive, which allows that vehicle to form a bubble between itself and its destination, and compress spacetime in that bubble to make the journey much shorter than if you just flew towards it in a rocket. In fact, you could travel very long distances in minutes.

I’d been working on my version of the Compression Drive, or C-Drive, for about six years. There were plenty of other designs, and some were better than others. That was the point of the IASP contest. Find the best design. The winner would almost certainly secure space transportation contracts with every government space agency in the world – after all, it was those agencies that had formed IASP in the first place – not to mention private interests.

It was also possible that the losers would be left with a few crumbs, but I’d sunk everything into End Run Space Systems and a few crumbs probably wouldn’t be enough. If I lost this race, I’d be done.

I didn’t want my dad to be a witness to another of my failures, and wondered if inviting him along was a bad idea. A terrible idea. But I also wanted him there if I succeeded. I wanted him to see that. It seemed worth the risk.

When my dad arrived for the first training session, he still seemed a little hesitant, like he was prepared to back out if he didn’t like the way things were going. I wished I’d done a better job of explaining what End Run did for the past ten years at family gatherings, but it was too late for that. I was determined to prove myself, and that started with the training. The sessions were as simple as we could make them, and involved a familiarization with Schuster II and its functionality, plus a series of safety drills. Finally, we engaged in simulated trips to Titan that were authentic enough to hopefully take the edge off the real thing.

My dad had been retired for a few years and was now seventy-one, but he was lean and energetic, and kept himself engaged with several hobbies, including tinkering with a pair of vintage internal-combustion cars. His hair was thinning on top, but he made up for it with a full, if trimmed, salt-and-pepper beard. He didn’t look much like an astronaut, and kept saying so, but I reassured him, more than once, that the C-Drive would make the old-school astronauts a thing of the past.

“Why don’t we just start from the ground?” he asked during one of the first briefings. “Turn on your C-Drive and head straight to Titan from here?”

“We would accumulate too much matter inside the bubble,” I said. “It’s a really bad idea to use the C-Drive inside an atmosphere. We also have to keep our ship from touching the side of the bubble, because then it can get pulled into the compression itself and torn apart. Matter rattling around in there would make that more of a possibility.”

“That’s reassuring,” Dad said, with a grin.

He was trying to be funny, but I felt a little burst of annoyance. I didn’t want him to think I hadn’t thought of everything.

“We’ll make several compression jumps,” I went on. “Every jump, even in a vacuum, causes some matter to accumulate inside the bubble. Also, we’ll use less fuel. And…”

He waited for me to finish.

“And what?”

I suddenly didn’t want to talk about the next point, fearing he’d think it was a flaw rather than a reasonable risk. But I’d have to tell him some time.

“It’s much easier to calculate a short jump,” I said. “In our test vehicles, errors started to creep in after a billion kilometres. Saturn will be farther away than that, even when it’s at its closest to Earth.”

“Well, alright. We don’t want to miss, do we?”

I felt a twist in my stomach. I told myself to calm down, that I was imagining that my dad thought I was going to screw this up.

“No, we don’t.”

A day before the launch, the three contestants gathered in the IASP hangar in front of their vehicles for a final media event. We hoped the world would be watching us.

Dad and I were wearing our End Run coveralls, which were navy blue with a company logo on the left side, above the heart. My daughter Molly had designed the logo, which was a yellow star streaking toward a cluster of smaller stars. We stood in front of Schuster II. On either side of us was our competition, the other two finalists, whittled down from twenty-five original entries. That I’d made it this far was still astonishing to me, even dreamlike, and as I looked at the other two ships, I still felt like the underdog. Mine was the smallest company, just a bunch of guys in an oversized garage. On my right was the team from Magnus Incorporated, a massive aerospace company that had made its name building commercial rockets. Their C-Drive ship looked a lot like a classic space capsule, and was bright silver, which made no sense to me, because in my calculations, light had to be kept to a minimum inside the bubble. Their project lead was Elaine Cardo, whose work I respected, so I could only assume she knew what she was doing. The capsule was called the Magnus Galacticus, which I thought was funny.

“Doesn’t that mean the Big Milky?” I whispered to Dad as we watched the four person Magnus crew, all dressed in retro-style silver pressure suits, assemble and wave in front of their ship. There was Cardo herself in the lead.

“Milky as in milky way, maybe?” Dad said.

Starr Quest, led by its founder Ethan Starr, had the third entry. I have to say up front I didn’t like them, and I didn’t like Starr himself. He’d tried to buy my designs a few years ago, and I suspected that one of my former partners had been a spy and had stolen some of our ideas. Starr had produced a ship that looked a lot like mine, though more a patch of midnight sky instead of a void.

“I know that guy from the news,” Dad said, looking toward Starr Quest’s ship. Ethan Starr was walking toward me with a smirk on his face. I thought he was coming to offer his hand and say good luck, so forced a smile and told myself to act like an adult.

“You should have sold to me when you had the chance,” Starr said, then nodded at Schuster II. “Will this thing even get off the ground?”

I thought he was joking or just trash-talking, so I grinned and said, “Once it builds up a head of steam, it’ll be soaring.”

His smirk turned even more sour.

“I mean it,” he said. “You’re in for a rude awakening, Milton.”

“That’s rather rude and childish of you, Mister Starr,” Dad said. “I would have assumed better from a man of your stature.”

Starr glanced at Dad, then looked back at me, still wearing that smirk.

“So nice you’re taking your pop into space.”

He turned and walked back toward where his other two crew members were waiting. I watched him, stunned, but Dad was gazing toward where the media had gathered.

“That wasn’t very professional,” Dad said. “Think anyone got a recording?”

I was fuming. To insult me like that, and in front of my dad! But I was determined not to show how I felt. I was too old to have to deal with schoolyard bullies.

“I think I want to win even more than ever,” I said.

We launched the next morning from a patch of Arizona desert into a flawless blue sky.

There was a lot of fanfare. The IASP Space Port (in the middle of that patch of Arizona desert) had never seen such a huge crowd. Our family was there in one of the VIP boxes set up in the stands: my wife Jeanne, who was also an engineer, Molly, my mom, my sister Ingrid, plus assorted other relatives who had begged me for tickets.

Magnus had decided to take off with their ship strapped to the back of a Boeing Jet Cruiser, a repurposed nuclear-electric jet airliner. This told me they weren’t confident in their launch capability to break free of Earth’s gravity without a little assistance. My ship and Starr’s would launch from the ground, side by side on the tarmac. The launch/land control – what I cleverly called LL – was based on the same principle that allowed us to form a compression bubble, but used in a much more subtle way. For lack of a better term, it was an anti-gravity drive, one of the innovations that I was certain would change the world, once it became commonplace. For now it was all new, and a huge energy hog. In fact, it used three times the energy as the C-Drive itself.

Dad and I waited for the start signal in the cabin of Schuster II. We were dressed in blue pressure suits, our helmets hanging behind us. I’d made the cabin as comfortable as possible, like a lounge with two easy chairs facing a bank of video screens that could show us several views, each from a different exterior camera, and a large one-way window, which looked through the blackened hull. The instrument panel stretched in a wide half-ring in front of us.

“The countdown started,” Dad said, pointing to one of many digital readouts. It was counting down from ten. Outside, the MC of the launch was getting the vast crowd to chant each number, like it was New Year’s Eve.

I’d already powered up the LL and set the altitude. I watched the numbers, and despite having done this about fifty times in simulation, I felt my stomach muscles clenching.

At zero I hit the launch control, and Schuster II rose into the sky. Away to our left, Magnus Galacticus was making its way down the long slow runaway on the back of its airplane, while to our right, Starr’s Freedom was rising, keeping pace with us. I watched both ships on the IASP video feed, displayed in our central monitor. The crowd in the stands had let out a collective gasp that turned to a roaring cheer.

“I don’t think anyone really expected to see that,” I murmured.

“Wow, I don’t feel a thing,” Dad said. “No G Forces at all. I thought that was an oversight in the simulation.”

“It’s a function of the antigrav,” I said, and wondered, with a pang, why he would think I would make such a mistake in the sim.

Our window showed us a curve of blue sky, fading to midnight above. Starr’s Freedom was a dark speck visible to our right. Far to our left, I saw a bright gleaming object suddenly shoot upwards, gaining and then surpassing our altitude. Magnus Galacticus.

I felt a sinking in the pit of my stomach. I’d thought they’d been fools to waste time on their piggyback, but their AG drive was obviously more powerful than mine after all. Now they had the lead.

The sky turned to night. We were above the earth.

“There it is,” said Dad, meaning the planet below.

Our LL cut, and we were drifting.

“There’s no time for awe,” I said. “This is a race, and we’re behind.”

Our next steps had to be precise. I keyed in the destination for the first C-Drive jump, which was Mars. According to the IASP feed, Magnus had already made its first jump. Freedom was still somewhere to starboard.

Dad folded his arms. “Well, hit it!”

I pressed the engage button. The vehicle lurched a bit, and the IASP feed went dead. In the window, an orange disc grew larger and larger until Mars was there below us.

It was as simple as that. The C-Drive put us into orbit around the red planet, and we saw Mariner Valley rolling away below. We were sending telemetry back to my End Run ground crew on Earth, and I could imagine them cheering that we’d made the first jump. I looked at Dad’s face. His expression could only be described as intense.

“So that’s Mars, close up,” he said. “Remember that telescope I got you for your ninth birthday? We used to look at Mars all the time, but it was just an orange disc.”

I was busy imputing the next jump.

“Ready?” I said.

“I’m ready.”

Mars rolled away, and the striped sphere of Jupiter grew in our window, so bright that the auto-shades darkened three points.

“This is like a slide show,” Dad said. “We looked at this one through that telescope, too. Whatever happened to it?”

“I still have it,” I said, preparing the final jump.

Saturn, with its elegant rings, zoomed toward us, then off to our left as the mottled green and amber ball of Titan filled the window. The C-Drive cut. We were there.

Schuster II picked up the signal from the beacon on the ground, which had been placed by a robotic vehicle during an early C-Drive test two years ago. It was our checkpoint.

“Starting the LL landing sequence,” I said.

The ship had standard maneuvering thrusters for finesse work, and I used them to get us into the proper position.

“This thing works like a charm,” said Dad.

We fell through dark clouds of brown and gold, going slowly, very slowly to avoid too much friction with the atmosphere. This was another of our little revolutions, even if it did use a lot of energy and could prove impractical for commercial use. It was also where we’d lose the most time in this race, but all three contestants were in the same boat, so it didn’t matter much. We were heading for the shore of a little methane lake known as Montoya Lacus, in the moon’s northern hemisphere.

“Are you sure this is all real?” Dad said, and he chuckled. “It’s all so much like the simulations.”

“They were pretty good,” I said, wondering why he would assume they wouldn’t have been accurate, then wondering why I would think that, why I was so hypersensitive about my father’s trivial comments. I noticed my right hand was shaking a little as I engaged the proximity scanner, looking for a visual on the beacon.

“There it is,” I said, pointing at the starboard video monitor.

“Well, that’s different,” said Dad.

The ground was a flat field of ice, white and blue and gray, and the beacon was an unnatural obelisk with a blinking red light on top. In a fan beyond the beacon, glittering even in the weak light of the distant sun, was a spread of metal debris. As we grew closer, preparing to land, I could no longer deny its origin.

“Magnus Galacticus,” I said.

They’d made it here before us, but something had gone wrong. There was no sign of bodies, which was a relief.

“Oh, that’s awful,” said Dad.

We touched down on the surface of Titan. The window showed an ice field, the beacon, the shore of the lake, plenty of debris, and a dark sky of piled amber clouds. I felt no wonder or triumph. I felt numb and hollow.

Dad put a hand on my shoulder.

“I can go out if you want,” he said. “Those people… they were your peers.”

Attached to the beacon was a series of metal tags. As part of the race, we had to retrieve one and bring it back to Earth. That meant going outside the vehicle.

“I’ll go,” I said, maybe with too much force. “You can come too, if you want.”

He patted my shoulder.

“No, if you go then I’ll stay here and man the fort.”

This was another time-consuming process. Environmental suits had gotten better over the decades, and more reliable, but we still had to go through the system checklist after I’d donned my helmet and my air tank. The ship’s airlock was behind the seats, and I crawled inside, closing the inner hatch behind me and depressurizing. When the light turned green, I opened the outer hatch and crawled out, hitting the ice with both feet.

“I’m on the surface,” I said into my radio.

“Check,” said Dad.

I had no time for grief, no time for horror at what had happened to Elaine and her crew, and no time to play around on the ice fields of Titan. I took giant, bouncing steps toward the beacon, almost falling over a few times, keeping my arms out to either side like a tightrope walker. I stopped just short of the beacon once, because there was debris at my feet. I recognized a chunk of the Magnus Galacticus, a power supply line and some fuel cells. They were standard parts and exactly like the ones on Schuster II, and that gave me a chill.

I took another step, and the world around me seemed to explode.

I tumbled backwards, hitting the ground and sliding along the ice. I caught a glimpse of Freedom as it landed and knew exactly what had happened. Ethan Starr had extended his C-Drive bubble into the atmosphere to avoid the time-consuming process of a slow descent from orbit.

It was insanity.

I rolled over and pushed myself to my feet. Schuster II had been shoved along the ice by the blast. I could see the huge skid mark.

“Dad!” I shouted. “Are you okay?”

“I’m okay,” came his voice. “But something’s wrong. Alarms are going off. We’re losing air. I have to put on my helmet – ”

I turned back toward the beacon. Someone from Starr’s ship was already outside and bouncing toward it. We’d beaten them here, which meant our compression had probably been better than theirs, but they’d cheated. At least, they’d done something reckless, even negligent.

My anger flared. I had to deal with the problem on my ship, but I still needed to grab my tag from the beacon.

I got there at the same time as the guy from Starr’s team, and saw his face through his helmet visor, saw his smirk. It was Starr himself.

“We’re losing power too,” Dad said. “Diagnostic says we have damaged fuel cells.”

Starr had his beacon tag in his hand. He tapped his helmet and held up two fingers. I assumed that meant Channel 2 on our intercom. I keyed the channel on my wrist controls.

“Why did you do that?” I said, knowing only Starr could hear me, because Dad and I had been using Channel 5.

“To win,” he said. His orange environment suit was bulky, but I could see him shrug.

“You damaged my ship,” I said.

“Yes, too bad about that. You’ll have to send for the rescue ship.”

Each one of us had a backup, a remote-controlled vehicle which was intended to fetch us in the event of a problem like this. I never dreamed we would have to use it.

“That’ll take time,” I said. “They’ll have to deploy it, do a system check. It could take hours. My Dad says we’re losing air. We have a leak, thanks to you. All we have is our suits, which means about a half hour of air each!”

“Sounds like bad planning on your part,” Starr said.

He turned away and bounced back to his ship.

I grabbed a beacon tag and bounced back to Schuster II.

Our situation was bad. We had an air leak around the window, and the blast had also shorted two of our fuel cells. The rest of the systems were working, but without the fuel cells, we couldn’t lift off. I also wasn’t sure how the ship would fare, without a fully pressurized cabin, in a compression bubble. I hadn’t tested that. I should have. It seemed obvious now.

I looked at my dad’s face behind his visor. He was still wearing his tinted glasses.

“I’m sorry, Dad,” I said.

Maybe I hadn’t thought of everything after all. Maybe I’d cut corners and paid lip service to basic safety. Tears started to stream down my face. I’d brought my father over seven-hundred million miles from home just to kill us both.

“I know you were never happy with what I did with my life,” I added.

I saw him frown.

“What do you mean?”

“I just could never figure out what to do. I just bounced around for years. Nothing ever worked. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Dad said. “Is that what’s been eating you since we started this? Because don’t think I haven’t noticed. And don’t think I’m not aware that, for some reason, you think I’m disappointed in you. I’ve never been disappointed in you. Never. Even when things were hard, I just wanted to help. And I thought I was helpful. Wasn’t I? You got your company off the ground. Of course I was worried, but you made a go of it. And now we’re on Titan! Don’t you see what a … staggering achievement that is?”

There was too much in this speech for me to process in the moment, but it still hit home. Suddenly I just felt really stupid, and thought that I’d been stupid for a long time.

“But we’re stuck here,” I said, “and we’re going to run out of air.”

“Maybe, but I’m sure the two of us can come up with something. Don’t you think? We need to get this thing into the sky.”

I actually slapped the outside of my helmet.

“There’s a fuel cell out there on the ground,” I said.

I’d forgotten about it.

“Well, that’s a start,” said Dad.

The fuel cells were plug-in and it took me about fifteen minutes to retrieve and deploy the one from the Magnus ship.

“Thanks, Elaine,” I whispered.

We could get home. The question now was whether we were still in the race.

“Should we even bother?” I said.

“Are you kidding? Of course we should! And you said your compression drive is faster than Starr’s. So we may still have time.”

I thought about that, and the solution was obvious, and insane.

“We could try it in one jump,” I said. “It will save us… at least a few minutes.”

Dad just stared at me.

“There are a lot of risks,” I went on. “We have a partly depressurized hull, and that can do weird things. There are the risks I told you about. And if I miscalculate, we could come out in the wrong location in orbit and have to spend hours circling the earth until we arrive above Arizona. We would still lose.”

“We owe it to everyone to try,” Dad said. “We owe it to those poor people who died out there.”

And we could still die too, but I didn’t say it. Nevertheless, Dad knew my thoughts.

“Your mom will understand,” he said. “We’ll contact your ground team on Earth, by voice, tell them what happened, what we’re doing. If this works, we’ll get back before the message. If not, at least they’ll know.” He paused. “Maybe avoid accusing Starr at this point. Just tell them, so everyone knows.”

“Okay, Dad,” I said.

As we slowly dropped toward the Arizona desert, Schuster II rattled and shook, but held together. We had a good image of the approaching ground on the port video screen, and I saw no sign of Starr’s ship.

We landed. We hadn’t been in micro-gravity long enough to be too wobbly, and we both climbed out and stood on the tarmac, dragging in mouthfuls of air and waving at the cheering crowd.

A minute later, Starr’s capsule descended.

Dad laughed and slapped me on the back.

_______________