Part 2 (2/2)

I remember when I was a little boy, seven years old, I guess, sitting with my grandfather, who must have been in his early sixties then, watching reports from the Discovery lander, setting down on Europa, releasing its probe, drilling down and down through pale red ice, down to a sunless sea.

Remember my grandfather telling me how, when he was seven, it'd been Sputnik on the TV, dirigible star terrifying on the edge that atom-menaced night, his grandfather a man born when the Wright Brothers flew, man who remembered being a little boy when Bleriot made his fabulous channel crossing.

There was no life under the icy crust of Europa, just a slushy sea of organics, scalding bubbles of water around lifeless black smokers. My grandfather died a few months before the first men got to Mars and proved there was no life there either, probably never had been, just as his grandfather died not long before Apollo touched down on the Moon.

I figured I'd probably die just before men got to the nearest star, living on in some little boy's memory.

Shows how wrong you can be.

And now here I stood on t.i.tan's lifeless chemical wonderland, facing a woman who'd gone mad, suffocating in a delirium of loss and denial.

Christie didn't argue with me, anger growing in her eyes, displacing the fear, masking her with the familiar scientist ego I'd seen on so many self-important faces, so often before. Sometimes they say, ”Well, you're just a tech,” and turn away. More often than not, I guess.

Christie led me outside to the halftrack and made me drive her back down to the beach. We parked the vehicle well clear of the instrument station and she told me to stand on top of the cargo bin. ”You stay here and watch. Otherwise we'll make too much waste heat and...”

On the run then, no more words for me.

Over by the instrument station, she took a pair of utility tongs and fiddled with something I could see sticking out of the beach regolith. Squint... yes. The top of a small dewar bottle. When she uncorked it, a hazy mist jetted, like smoke from a genie's bottle, rolling briefly, beachscape beyond made oily looking by the vapor.

”What's that stuff?”

She was panting on the radio link, out of breath, voice loud in my ears as she pulled the bottle from the ice. ”Distilled from beach infiltrates. It's... what they eat.”

She had it clear now and was scurrying toward the rimy area where cracked-ice beach became Waxsea surface.

”What're you...”

”Shut up. Watch.”

She suddenly dumped the bottle, just a splash of clear liquid that quickly curdled and grew dark, billow of greasy fog momentarily disfiguring the air, then scuttled back toward me, dropping off the tongs and empty bottle as she pa.s.sed by the station.

And it didn't take long for the colors to bloom.

Before she got to my side, blobs of red and yellow, pink, green, blue, were surfacing by the edge of the beach. Surfacing and then sliding inward, making the beginnings of a ragged vortex around the chemical spill. Around and down, dropping under the surface, not quite disappearing, surfacing again.

The smoking puddle of goo started to shrink.

And Christie, standing beside me now, said, ”You see? You see?”

I said, ”I don't know what I'm seeing. I...” I jumped down off the halftrack, bounding slowly in the low-gee, heading across the beach.

Christie said, ”Stop! Stop it, you'll...”

I stopped well short of the slowly writhing conflagration of colors, marveling at how they stayed distinct from one another. You'd think when the blue one touches the yellow, there'd be a bit of green along the interface. Nothing. Not even a line. Not even an illusion of green, made by my Earth-grown eyes.

They looked sort of like cartoon amoebas, amoebas as a child imagines them before he's looked through a microscope for the first time and realized ”pseudopod” means exactly what it says.

And it really did look like they were eating the goo.

Suddenly, the blue blob nearest where I stood became motionless. Grew a brief speckle of orange dots that seemed to lift above its surface for just a moment, then it was gone, vanished into the beach ice.

All in the twinkling of an eye, too quick for me to know exactly what I'd seen.

The others followed it into nothingness within a second or so, leaving the smoking goo behind, an evaporating puddle less than half its original size.

I think I stood staring, empty-headed, for about thirty seconds, before trying to imagine ways you could account for this without invoking the magic word life. ”Christie?”

Nothing. But I could hear her rasping breath, made immediate by the radio link, though she could have been kilometers away. ”Christie...” I turned around.

She was standing right behind me, less than two meters away, eyes enormous through the murky faceplate of her s.p.a.cesuit. She was holding my ice axe, taken from its mount on the outside of the halftrack, clutched in both hands, diagonal across her chest.

I stood as still as I could, looking into her eyes, trying to fathom... Finally, I swallowed, and said, ”How long have you been standing there?”

”Long enough,” she said. Then she let the axe fall, holding it in one hand, head raising a few icechips from the beach. ”Long enough, but... I couldn't do it.”

She turned and started to walk away, back toward the halftrack.

The ride back to the habitat was eerie, full of that shocky feeling you get right after a serious injury, when the world seems remote and impossible. I couldn't imagine what would've happened if she'd tried to hit me with the axe.

Like something out of one of those d.a.m.ned stupid old movies.

The one about the first expedition to Mars, movie made almost a hundred years ago. The one where the repair crew is out on the hull when the ”meteor storm” comes. There's a bullet-like flicker. The inside of this guy's helmet lights up, showing a stunned face, twisting in agony, then the light goes out and he's dead, faceplate fogged over black.

Just like that.

Our suit pressure's kept just a few millibars over t.i.tan ambient by helium ballast. Maybe if she cut my suit, there'd be a spark and... I pictured myself running for the halftrack, spouting twists of slow blue flame.

She said, ”I guess...”

Nothing. Outside, the sky was dull brown and streaked with gold, as well-lit as t.i.tan's sky ever gets. Somewhere up there, Saturn's crescent was growing smaller, deepening shadow cast over her rings. You could tell where the sun was, a small, sparkly patch in the sky, like a bit of pyrite fog.

I said, ”I keep trying to think of ways it could just be some fancy chemical reaction. I mean, organic chemistry...”

She snickered, making my skin crawl.

Back in the habitat, out of our suits, sitting at the table in our baggy underwear, we ate Caravan Humpburgers so old the meat tasted like filter paper, the buns stiff and plasticky, and mushy french fries that must've been thawed and refrozen at least once in their history.

Too much silence. Christie sat reading the ads on the back of a Humpburger package. Something about a contest where if you saved your wrappers and got four matching Humpy the Camels, you could win a ”science vacation” to Moonbase.

I pulled the thing out from under her fingers and looked at the fine print. The trip date had been seven weeks before the impact. Christ. I said, ”Maybe whoever won this is still alive.”

Or maybe, knowing what was about to happen, they just sent him home to die.

Christie was staring at me, eyes big and unreadable.

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