I grinned back. “Yeah, but is it probable?”
“I don’t believe so,” he answered seriously. “But I believe that Dmirov would believe so. Possibly Ezequiel. Possibly Commander Cox. Certainly Silverman.”
“And we must assume that any of them might also have bugged a suit ”
“Tell me: Do you agree that if this conference generates any information of great strategic value, Silverman will attempt to establish sole possession of it?”
Chatting with Chen was like juggling chainsaws. I sighed. We were being honest. “Yeah—if he got a chance to pull it off, sure. But that’d take some doing.”
“One person with the right program tapes could bring Siegfried close enough to Terra for retrieval,” he said, and I noticed that he didn’t say “one man.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“I am presently jamming any possible bugs in this vehicle. I believe Silverman will attempt this thing. I smell it. If he does, I will kill him at once. You and your people react quickly in free fall; I want you to understand my motives.”
“And they are?”
“Preservation of civilization on Terra. The continued existence of the human race.”
I decided to try throwing him ahot one. “Will you shoot him with that automatic?”
He registered faint distaste. “I cycled that out the airlock two weeks after departure,” he said. “An absurd weapon in free fall, as I should have realized. No, I shall probably break his back.”
Don’t give this guy strong serves: his return is murder.
“Where will you stand in that event, Mr. Armstead?”
“Eh?”
“Silverman is a fellow Caucasian, a fellow North American. You share a cultural matrix. Is that a stronger bond than your bond with Homo caelestis?”
“Eh?” I said again.
“Your new species will not survive long if the blue Earth is blown apart,” Chen said harshly, “which is what that madman Silverman would have. I don’t know how your mind works, Mr. Armstead: what will you do?”
“I respect your right to ask the question,” I said slowly. “I will do what seems right to me at the time. I have no other answer.”
He searched my face and nodded. “I would like to go outside now.”
“Jesus Christ,” I exploded, and he cut me off.
“Yes, I know—I just said I couldn’t function in free space, and now I want to try.” He gestured with his helmet. “Mr. Armstead, I anticipate that I may die soon. Once before that time I must hang alone in eternity, subject to no acceleration, without right angles for frames, in free space. I have dreamed of space for most of my life, and feared to enter it. Now I must. As nearly as I can say it in your language, I must confront my God.”
I wanted to say yes. “Do you know how much that can resemble sensory deprivation?” I argued. “How’d you like to lose your ego in a spacesuit? Or even just your lunch?”
“I have lost my ego before. Someday I will forever. I do not get nauseous.” He began putting his helmet on.
“No, dammit, watch out for the nipple. Here, let me do it.”
After five minutes he switched his radio back on and said, shakily, “I’m coming in now.” After that he didn’t say anything until we were unbuttoning in Siegfried’s shuttlecraft bay. Then he said, very softly, “It is I who am Homo excastra. And the others,” and those were the last words he said to me until the first day of Second Contact.
What I replied was, “You are always welcome in my home, Doctor,” but he made no reply.
Deceleration brought a horde of minor disasters. If you move into a small apartment (and never leave it) by the end of a year your belongings will have tended to spread outconsiderably. Zero gee amplifies the tendency. Storing everything for acceleration would have been impossible even if all we’d had to contend with was the twenty-five hours of a hundredth gee. But even the straightest, laser-sighted pipeline has some kinks in it, and our course was one of the longest pipelines ever laid by Man (over a billion klicks). Titan’s gravity well was a mighty small target at the end of it, that we had to hit just precisely right. Before Skyfac provided minimicrochip computer crystals the trick would not have been possible, and we had had small course corrections en route. But the moon swam up fast, and we took a couple of one-gee burns that, though mercifully short, made me strongly doubt that we could survive even a two-year return trip. They also scattered wreckage, mostly trivial, all over the ship: Fibber McGee’s Closet, indoors. The worst of it, though, appeared to be a ruptured water line to the midships shower bags, and the air conditioning handled it.
Even being forewarned of an earthquake doesn’t help much.
On the other hand, cleanup was next to no problem at all—again, thanks to zero gee. All we had to do was wait, and sooner or later virtually all of the debris collected on the air conditioning grilles of its own accord, just like always. Free-fall housekeeping mostly involves replacing worn-out velcro and grille screens.
(We use sleeping webs and cocoons when we sleep, even though everything in a free-fall domicile is well padded. It’s not as restful—but without any restraints, you keep waking up when you bump into the air grille. One idiot student had wanted to nap in Town Hall, which has no sleeping gear, so he turned off the air conditioning. Fortunately someone came in before he could suffocate in the carbon dioxide sphere of his own exhalations. I paid for an unscheduled elevator and had him dirtside twenty hours later.)
And so nearly at once everyone found time to hang themselves in front of a video monitor and eyeball Titan.
From the extensive briefing we all studied, this abstract:
Titan is the sixth of Saturn’s nine moons, and quite the largest. I had been expecting something vaguely Luna-sized—but the damned thing has a diameter of almost 5,800 klicks, roughly that of the planet Mercury, or about four tenths that of Earth! At that incredible size its mass is only about .002 that of Earth’s. Its orbital inclination is negligible, less than a degree—that is, it orbits almost precisely around the equator of Saturn (as does the Ring), at a mean distance of just over ten planetary diameters. It is tidally locked, so that it always presents the same face to its primary, like Luna, and it takes only about sixteen days to circle Saturn—a speedy moon indeed for its size. (But then Saturn itself has a ten-and-a-quarter-hour day.)
From the time that it had been close enough to eyeball it had looked reddish, and now it looked like Mars on fire, girdled with vast clouds like thunderheads of blood. Through them lunarlike mountains and valleys glowed a slightly cooler red, as though lit by a gobo with a red gel—which, essentially, they were. The overall effect was of hellfire and damnation.
That preternatural red color was one of the principal reasons why Cox and Song went into emergency overdrive the moment we were locked into orbit. The world scientific community had gone into apoplexy when its expensive Saturn probe had been hijacked by the military, for a diplomatic mission, and into double apoplexy when they understood that the scientific complement of the voyage would consist of a single Space Command physicist and an engineer. So Bill and Col. Song spent the twenty-four hours we remained in that orbit working like fishermen when the tide makes, taking the absolute minimum of measurements and recordings that would satisfy Siegried’s original planners. Led by Susan Pha Song, they worked from taped instructions and under the waspish direction of embittered scientists on Terra (with a transmission lag of an hour and a quarter, which improved no one’s temper), and they did a good, dogged job. It is a little difficult to imagine the kind of mind that would find chatting with extrasolar plasmoids less exciting than studying Saturn’s sixth moon, but there are some—and the startling thing is, they’re not entirely crazy.