You’d play the usual interplanetary pooclass="underline" bounce off Earth, Venus, Jupiter maybe, and each time steal a little of their energy of rotation around the sun.”
“Fine,” said Angel thickly, “but if you’re talking about going in to Venus you’d have to carry sun-shields, and—”
“Details,” Marcus White said. “Fucking details. You always were a windy bastard, Angel.”
Angel grinned. He said, “Okay. But even if you cut your initial mass in LEO by, say, fifty percent, you’re still looking at dozens of Shuttle launches. And there’s no way Hadamard would back such a mission.”
Barbara Fahy sighed. “He’s right, I’m afraid.”
“No, he isn’t,” Isaac Rosenberg said. “You’re making the wrong assumptions.”
Angel said, “Huh?”
Rosenberg said mildly, “What if you don’t come home?”
There was a long silence.
Kevin, the housekeeper, called them to eat.
The meal was set up in small china dishes on candle-heated plate-warmers, all arranged on a big rotating serving platform on top of Benacerraf’s favorite piece of furniture, her walnut dining table. There was hot and sour soup, spare ribs, chicken in ginger, quorn with spring onions, Szechuan prawns, and a variety of rice and noodle plates; there was water, beer and wine on the table.
Angel drained his glass again. “That kid of yours fixes a good drink,” he said.
“Yes. He’s a good cook, too.”
White said, “What is he, working his way through college?”
“…Something like that.” She left it there. She doubted that White, who’d spent his adult life in the monkish confines of the space program, would understand much more.
Kevin, from Galveston, was a pleasant, plump boy, twenty-three years old, already a college graduate. Actually he was earning his keep while he paid off his college debt, and pursued his art.
Benacerraf had given him a garage, to use as a studio. Once, Kevin had shown Benacerraf his work. It was sculpture. The main piece was a large block of rendered animal-fat, made into a half-scale self-portrait of Kevin. The statue showed Kevin lowering his shorts and stroking his own genitals. The statue hadn’t been carved; Kevin had gnawed it, crudely, with his teeth. The marks of the teeth were clearly visible, especially where Kevin had used his chipped left incisor. Kevin explained that this was only a sketch; the final version would be made of human fat liposuctioned from his own body. Or maybe his feces.
Benacerraf didn’t go back into the garage after that.
The thing of it was, Kevin didn’t have any other skills. He was a college graduate; his degree had been in recursive and self-referential art, with special studies of the greats of the 1990s: Janine Antoni, Scan Landers, Gregory Green, Charles Long.
Demographic projections for Kevin’s age-group — with modern medical care, preventative programs, reduced-calorie dieting and prosthetics — predicted a full century of active life ahead of him. That, thought Benacerraf, provided time for a lot of shit-gnawing.
At that, gnawing shit was better than creating nothing at all, which was to be the fate, as far as Benacerraf could see, of most of Kevin’s generation, as they lay in their VR-beds and pushed increasingly stale, second-hand information around the net.
Kevin, anyhow, was a satisfactory housekeeper. Benacerraf paid his wages, and tried not to think about his future. She didn’t see what else she could do for him, or the millions like him, unemployed and unemployable…
The seven of them gathered around the table and began to spoon food into their small bowls. Everyone but Marcus White opted to use chopsticks.
Benacerraf, looking around at the ring of relaxed, candlelit faces, felt pleased. There was a warm, friendly, domestic atmosphere here; they were seven humans, rooted to the Earth, enjoying a shared ritual that dated back to the emergence of humanity.
Her purpose, tonight, was to try to build this group into a team, who would have to work together to achieve something no other humans had attempted — and, if, impossibly, this proposal came to fruition, some of whom might soon depart the Earth forever.
She still hadn’t decided whether to put her weight behind this dumb-ass Titan proposal. Up to now, it had just been a hobby, something to take her mind off the hierarchy of Flight Readiness Review records from STS-143. The reaction of the group, tonight, could decide that.
They started talking about Titan again.
Nicola Mott said, “Let me go through this again. From the top. You’re seriously suggesting that we send a manned mission. That we travel one way, to colonize Titan.”
“Why not?” Rosenberg said. “Maybe we’re done with dipping our toes in the water and running.”
“Like with Apollo,” Marcus White said heavily.
“Like with Apollo.”
Rosenberg said, “Look, the whole point of this proposal is that we’re going to prove that a colony on Titan would be viable. More than that: it would soon become an actual economic asset to the United States, to Earth. How are we going to do that, if we aren’t prepared to put ourselves on the line, give up a few home comforts?” He sounded irritated, frustrated at his inability to communicate, their inability to see. “We go out there to stay for years, we build a home, we survive until a retrieval capability is put together. We cannibalize the ship that carries us, turn it into surface shelters. We use ISRU, as Siobhan says. We make Titan such an attractive place that resupply and retrieval missions have to follow.”
Marcus White said, ” ‘We’, Rosenberg?”
“Yes.” He looked uncomfortable, the candlelight shining from his glasses. “If there’s a ship going to Titan, I want to be on it. I’m best qualified. Isn’t that what this is all about?”
White grinned. “Hell, yes. I’d go myself.”
In the silence that followed, the others stared at him.
“When I walked on that lava plain south of Copernicus, with Tom Lamb, I sure as hell never figured I’d only get the one shot at it. There would have been an extended-Apollo program, with lunar orbital missions, and long-stay shelters hauled up by dual-launched Saturn Vs, and all the rest. And then more: flyby flights to Venus and Mars, the space station, permanent colonies on the Moon, eventually landing flights to Mars itself…
“But the whole damn thing shut down, even before Armstrong stepped out at Tranquillity.” He put down his drink, and the fingers of his big hands knitted together, restless. “I must have talked about my Moon trip a thousand times. Ten thousand. And the one thing I’ve never managed to put over is how it feels not to be able to get back. Ever.” He grinned at Benacerraf, embarrassed, uneasy. “They should shoot us poor fucking Moonwalkers in the head. Anyhow, it won’t be me. I realize that. Christ, I’m seventy-four years old, already. I’m a grandpa three times over. But I’ll tell you, I’d just like to see one more guy lift off out of the gravity well and go someplace — plant Old Glory on one more moon — before the last of us sad old Apollo geezers dies of old age.”
“And,” Mott pressed, “if we don’t succeed? — if Earth doesn’t jump for the bait? If we set out, and they just let the space facilities rust? What then?”
Marcus White leaned toward Mott over the table. “The question for you is, having heard that — would you go?”
Mott thought for a moment. She opened her mouth.
But, Benacerraf noted, she didn’t immediately say no.
White leaned back. “You know, they used to ask us a question like that, during our interviews for the Astronaut Office. Marcus, would you submit to a two-year journey to Mars? Suppose I tell you that the chances of surviving the trip are one in two. Do you go? Absolutely not, said I. One in ten, maybe.” He looked at Mott. “I got it right. The point was partly to see how dumb I was, how foolhardy. But also to find out if I had it in me.”