The wait ended at exactly 15:36 ship time. Marchenko reported, “I am happy to announce that a human being has seen the light of day, or rather the light of the spaceship. I give you the first true citizen of space.” Then he put the commander on the microphone. Martin could not understand what she said between sobs.
Francesca interpreted for her, “The mother is overjoyed and would like to see the father of the child for a moment.”
“Is that an order?” asked Hayato, and he too was hard to understand.
“Yes,” the commander replied.
“To protect the privacy of mother and child, I now deactivate the communication. Marchenko, out.”
Jiaying looked at Martin. Were those tracks of tears on her face? he wondered, but he did not ask. Instead, he took her in his arms and squeezed her tight. Then he ended the embrace. She had to concentrate on her task.
Watson continued to report the current data for the ship’s movement. The numbers were constantly decreasing. No problems, the drives are working perfectly. Martin clenched his fists. I really do not need any more excitement now.
Another hour had passed by.
“Neumaier to Masukoshi, see any conspicuous patterns?”
“Negative.”
This is good, Martin thought—and yet it seems strange to me. Will everything work so smoothly? I can’t allow myself to think about this now. Then he noticed how difficult it had been for him to address Hayato by his last name. He’d had to work to remember it. With Marchenko, on the other hand, he always forgot the first name. But it didn’t matter, as Marchenko was simply Marchenko. With Jiaying, though, it was easy to remember the last name; Li—two letters in Latin script. She had drawn the Chinese symbol on his hand. The morning after, Martin had deliberately not washed that particular hand, and now he looked down at it. I wish I could look at it, but I am not allowed to take off my glove. Since he was starting to feel cold, he activated the gloves’ heating circuit.
“23 34 34. All systems online and in the specified range.” This was Watson’s latest report.
Wait a moment, Martin noticed, the number is larger than the one Watson reported ten minutes ago. Martin’s palms were getting moist. The movement of the ship does not seem any different.
He asked, “Watson, did I hear you correctly?”
“I cannot answer that question.”
“Watson, are we moving away from Saturn again?” Martin insisted.
“Correct. The distance to the planet is increasing.”
“Watson, why is talking to you like pulling teeth?”
“I am interpreting this antiquated expression as a request for additional information.”
“Watson, please.” The AI is definitely going too far. Martin decided he would simplify the Human Logic Module. Watson is trying too much to act like a human being.
“Spaceship is moving at the intended speed. The maneuver has achieved its purpose,” the AI reported.
“Watson, why did you not say that right away?”
“Planned flight maneuver is not yet finished. There was no order to report an early completion of the goal. Data allow for the correct interpretation.”
Martin clapped his hands and laughed. Jiaying got up and gave him a strange look. No, I have not lost my mind. He had only forgotten that he’d had this conversation via helmet radio. He blew her a kiss, which confused Jiaying even more.
“Neumaier to everybody. Watson reports the braking maneuver near Saturn has been successful. Hayato, we’ve got to talk about the programming of the AI.”
December 10, 2046, ILSE
The gas planet Saturn completely filled the porthole. Red, brown, and greenish stripes extended parallel to the equator. These were cloud systems that received their colors from ammonia crystals and consisted mostly of hydrogen. Sometimes, they parted and showed the water ice clouds below that moved at 1,930 kilometers per hour.
Martin traced a white spot. That must be one of the inner moons. He did not know which one it was. Maybe even Enceladus, our goal. In the Southern Hemisphere there are huge vortices that are larger than the continents on Earth, he noted. With the help of the South Polar Vortex—which might be billions of years old and could be clearly seen—Martin adjusted the dimensions. This storm is larger than Earth, he calculated.
The rings surround the planet like the rim of a sombrero. The control jets had changed the spacecraft’s inclination so much that the rings were now visible in all their glory. One could clearly see the Cassini Division between the outer A Ring and the inner B Ring. Their goal was outside these distinct rings, in the E Ring, which the sensors of the ship noticed, but Martin’s eyes could not.
The ship still flew on an elliptical course around Saturn. Their closest approach to Saturn would be within the rings, the farthest beyond the large moons. To reach Enceladus, the ship must decelerate at the right moment, when it was closest to Saturn. That moved the farthest point of its trajectory closer to the planet.
At the same time, they had to adjust its orbital plane. They had flown toward this planet in the same plane in which Earth and Saturn moved around the sun. Most moons and the rings orbited Saturn in a plane that was tilted in comparison to it. However, if they moved into this plane too soon, they ran the risk of having to fly through the rings. While these were only a few meters thick, a collision with a lump of ice of just 10 centimeters in diameter could be fatal due to the high speed of the spaceship. Therefore, their goal was a trajectory in which the closest point lay outside of the rings, while its farthest one got them close to the moon Enceladus.
The commander had decided to approach the goal slowly. While the DFDs would allow for a quicker adjustment of their velocity, Amy did not want too much risk. Now she had even more of a reason for this decision—they had lots of time to investigate the planet, the moon, and the ring system with every instrument available. Mission Control had already sent a wish list compiled by astronomers from Earth, who still had many unanswered questions, for instance concerning the creation of the ring system. The list was too long to be completed, but at least the crew was kept busy.
I like this kind of work, Martin thought. This gives me time to look out the window and to daydream. Now and then he had to readjust an instrument or aim it toward another object, or compile and transmit data for a scientist who had asked to receive results in advance instead of through the routine transmission to Earth. The capacity of their downlink was sufficient for such requests, as the DFDs allowed for a much higher transmission power than in previous space probes. Even if they never landed they would advance research by years. The most difficult tasks were those when the scientists provided initial data in a format that the comparable onboard measuring system did not understand.