It’s that red color. Titan should look sort of blue-greenish. Yet even from Earth it is clearly red. Why? Well, the thing that had professors in a flutter was that Titan’s atmosphere (mostly methane) and temperature characteristics made it about the last place in the Solar System where theory grudgingly admitted the possibility of “life as we know it.” Experiments with a Titan-normal chamber produced Miller’s “primal flash” chemical reactions, a good sign, and the unspoken but dearly beloved theory was that maybe the red cloud-cover was organic matter of some kind—or even conceivably whatever kind of pollution a methane-breafher would produce. I couldn’t follow even Raoul’s popularization of the byplay, and I was only peripherally interested, but I gathered that by the end of twenty-four hours, a pessimist would have said “no” and an optimist “maybe.” Raoul mentioned a lot of ambiguous data, stuff that seemed self-contradictory—which didn’t surprise me in light of how prematurely Siegfried had been rushed into commission.
I divided my own attention between Titan and Saturn, which the scientists wouldn’t be interested in until after the conference, when they could get a closer look. From where we were it took up about a 6 or 7° piece of sky (for reference, Luna seen from Earth subtends an angle of about half a degree; Earth seen from Luna is about 2° wide. Your fist at arm’s length is about 10°.), and the Ring, edge on to us, added another couple of planetary diameters or almost 14°. Call it a total package of 20°, two fists’ width. Not cosmic; at home, at the Studio, I’ve seen Mother Terra take up more than half the sky at perigee. But when Earth did take up 20°, we were about 22,000 klicks from its surface. Saturn was 1.2 million klicks away.
It’s a hellacious big planet—the biggest in the System if you don’t call Jupiter a planet (I don’t call it at all. It might answer). Its diameter is a little over 116,000 klicks, roughly nine Earths, and it masses a whopping ninety-five Earths. This makes its surface gee of 1.15 Earth normal seem absurdly low—but it must be borne in mind that Saturn is only .69 as dense as a comparable sphere of water (while Earth has more than five times the density of water). Even that low a gee field was more than enough to kill a Homo caelestis or a Homo excastra, were we silly enough to land on Saturn. And the escape velocity is more than three times that for Earth (a weak gravity well—but a big one).
It doesn’t exactly have asurface, though, as I understand it. Oh, there’s probably rock down there somewhere. But long before you got down that far, you’d come to rest, floating on methane, which is what Saturn (and its “atmosphere”) mostly is.
Its mighty Ring appears to be a moon that didn’t make it, uncountable trillions of orbiting rocks from sand- to boulder-size, covered with water ice.
Together they present an indescribably beautiful appearance. Saturn is a kind of dreamy ocher yellow with wide bands of dark, almost chocolate brown, and it is quite bright as planets go. The Ring, being dirty ice, incorporates literally every color in the visible spectrum, sparkling and shifting as the independent orbits of its component parts change relation. The overall impression is of an immense agate or tiger-eye circled by the shattered remnants of a mighty rainbow. Smaller, literal rainbows come and go randomly within the orbiting mass, like lights seen through wet glasses.
It was a sight I never tired of, will never forget as long as I live,and it alone was worth the trip from Earth and the loss of my heritage. I couldn’t decide whether it was more beautiful at the height of our orbit, when we were above the Ring, or at the other end when we were edge-on; both had their points. Raoul spent virtually every minute of his free time glued to the bulkhead across from his video screen, his Musicmaster on his lap, its headphones over his ears, fingers seeking and questioning among its keys. He would not let us put the speakers on—but he gave Harry the auxiliary phones. I have subsequently heard the symphony he derived from that working tape, and I would have traded Earth for that.
The aliens, of course, were the utter and total center of Bill Cox’s attention. Their high-energy emissions nearly overloaded his instruments, though they were too far away to be seen. About a million klicks, give or take a few hundred thousand, waiting with apparent patience at the approximate forward Trojan point for Saturn-Titan. The actual locating of that point was extremely complicated by the presence of eight other moons, and I’m told that no Trojan point would be stable in the long term—even if the O’Neill Colony movement ever gets going at L-5, it’ll never spread to Saturn. But what it came down to was that the aliens were waiting about 60° “down the line” of Titan’s orbit, at a sensible place for a conference. Which made it even more probable that that was their intention.
So ournext move was to go say howdy. Siegfried and alclass="underline" that Trojan point was a good four light-seconds away, and lag was not acceptable to any of us.
We dancers also had business of our own to occupy us while Bill and Col. Song were slaving, of course. We didn’t spend all our time rubbernecking.
The Limousine had been fully supplied and outfitted, field- and board-tested down to the last circuit, and secured long since, in transit. So naturally the first thing we did was to check the supplies and fittings and board-test down to the last circuit again. If we should buy the emptiest of farms, the next expedition would be two or three years in arriving at the very least—and maybe by then the alien’s Trojan stability would have decayed enough to irritate them and they’d have gone home.
Besides, I wanted personal words with them.
And that was the root of the last thing we did before blasting for their location, which was to hold the last several hours of a year-long quarrel with the diplomats over choreography.
I finally jaunted right out on them, prepared to float in my room and let them dance. I hadn’t lost my temper; only my will to argue.
DeLaTorre waited a polite interval and then buzzed at my door. “Come in.”
The free-fall haircut spoiled his appearance; he should have had hair like Mark Twain. He had had to shave his beard too—there’s no room for one in a helmet—and hating shaving he did it badly; but it actually improved his looks, almost enough to compensate for the big fuzzy skull. His warm brown eyes showed unspeakable fatigue, their lids raisinlike with wrinkles. He stuck himself to the wall, moving with the exaggerated care of the bone-tired, so that he was aligned with the local vertical built into it by its terrestrial designers (when Harry builds his first billion-dollar spaceship, he’ll be more imaginative).
DeLaTorre would, at his age, never make a Space Man. Out of respect, I assumed the same orientation. What little anger I had had was gone; my determination remained.
“Charles, an accommodation must be reached”
“Ezequiel, don’t tell me you’re as blind as the rest of them.”
“They only feel that the first movement might more properly be respectful, rather than stern; solemn rather than emotional. Once we have established communication, opened relations with these beings in mutual dignity, then would be the time to state our grievances. The third or fourth movement, perhaps.”