"Uh ... guys?"
Alan stopped. "Damn it, O'Brien, now I've got to start all over again."
"Welcome back to the land of the living," Consuelo said. "You should check out the readings we're getting from the robofish. Lots of long-chain polymers, odd fractions ... tons of interesting stuff."
"Guys?"
This time her tone of voice registered with Alan. "What is it, O'Brien?"
"I think my harness is jammed."
Lizzie had never dreamed disaster could be such drudgery. First there were hours of back- and-forth with the NAFTASA engineers. What's the status of rope 14? Try tugging on rope 8. What do the D-rings look like? It was slow work because of the lag time for messages to be relayed to Earth and back. And Alan insisted on filling the silence with posts from the VoiceWeb. Her plight had gone global in minutes, and every unemployable loser on the planet had to log in with suggestions.
_"Thezgemoth337, here. It seems to me that if you had a gun and shot up through the balloon, it would maybe deflate and then you could get down."_
"I don't have a gun, shooting a hole in the balloon would cause it not to deflate but to rupture, I'm 800 hundred meters above the surface, there's a sea below me, and I'm in a suit that's not equipped for swimming. Next."
_"If you had a really big knife -- "_
"Cut! Jesus, Greene, is this the best you can find? Have you heard back from the organic chem guys yet?"
"Their preliminary analysis just came in," Alan said. "As best they can guess -- and I'm cutting through a lot of clutter here -- the rain you went through wasn't pure methane."
"No shit, Sherlock."
"They're assuming that whitish deposit you found on the rings and ropes is your culprit. They can't agree on what it is, but they think it underwent a chemical reaction with the material of your balloon and sealed the rip panel shut."
"I thought this was supposed to be a pretty nonreactive environment."
"It is. But your balloon runs off your suit's waste heat. The air in it is several degrees above the melting- point of ice. That's the equivalent of a blast furnace, here on Titan. Enough energy to run any number of amazing reactions. You haven't stopped tugging on the vent rope?"
"I'm tugging away right now. When one arm gets sore, I switch arms."
"Good girl. I know how tired you must be."
"Take a break from the voice-posts," Consuelo suggested, "and check out the results we're getting from the robofish. It's giving us some really interesting stuff."
So she did. And for a time it distracted her, just as they'd hoped. There was a lot more ethane and propane than their models had predicted, and surprisingly less methane. The mix of fractions was nothing like what she'd expected. She had learned just enough chemistry to guess at some of the implications of the data being generated, but not enough to put it all together. Still tugging at the ropes in the sequence uploaded by the engineers in Toronto, she scrolled up the chart of hydrocarbons dissolved in the lake.
Solute: Solute mole fraction
Ethyne: 4.0 x 10-4
Propyne: 4.4 x 10-5
1,3-Butadiyne: 7.7 x 10-7
Carbon Dioxide: 0.1 x 10-5
Methanenitrile: 5.7 x 10-6
But after a while, the experience of working hard and getting nowhere, combined with the tedium of floating farther and farther out over the featureless sea, began to drag on her. The columns of figures grew meaningless, then indistinct.
Propanenitrile: 6.0 x 10^-5
Propenenitrile: 9.9 x 10^-6
Propynenitrile: 5.3 x 10^-6
Hardly noticing she was doing so, she fell asleep.
She was in a lightless building, climbing flight after flight of stairs. There were other people with her, also climbing. They jostled against her as she ran up the stairs, flowing upward, passing her, not talking.
It was getting colder.
She had a distant memory of being in the furnace room down below. It was hot there, swelteringly so. Much cooler where she was now. Almost too cool. With every step she took, it got a little cooler still. She found herself slowing down. Now it was definitely too cold. Unpleasantly so. Her leg muscles ached. The air seemed to be thickening around her as well. She could barely move now.
This was, she realized, the natural consequence of moving away from the furnace. The higher up she got, the less heat there was to be had, and the less energy to be turned into motion. It all made perfect sense to her somehow.
Step. Pause.
Step. Longer pause.
Stop.
The people around her had slowed to a stop as well. A breeze colder than ice touched her, and without surprise, she knew that they had reached the top of the stairs and were standing upon the building's roof. It was as dark without as it had been within. She stared upward and saw nothing.
"Horizons. Absolutely baffling," somebody murmured beside her.
"Not once you get used to them," she replied.
"Up and down -- are these hierarchic values?"
"They don't have to be."
"Motion. What a delightful concept."
"We like it."
"So you _are_ me?"
"No. I mean, I don't think so."
"Why?"
She was struggling to find an answer to this, when somebody gasped. High up in the starless, featureless sky, a light bloomed. The crowd around her rustled with unspoken fear. Brighter, the light grew. Brighter still. She could feel heat radiating from it, slight but definite, like the rumor of a distant sun. Everyone about her was frozen with horror. More terrifying than a light where none was possible was the presence of heat. It simply could not be. And yet it was.
She, along with the others, waited and watched for ... something. She could not say what. The light shifted slowly in the sky. It was small, intense, ugly.
Then the light _screamed._
She woke up.
"Wow," she said. "I just had the weirdest dream."
"Did you?" Alan said casually.
"Yeah. There was this light in the sky. It was like a nuclear bomb or something. I mean, it didn't look anything like a nuclear bomb, but it was terrifying the way a nuclear bomb would be. Everybody was staring at it. We couldn't move. And then..." She shook her head. "I lost it. I'm sorry. It was so just so strange. I can't put it into words."
"Never mind that," Consuelo said cheerily. "We're getting some great readings down below the surface. Fractional polymers, long-chain hydrocarbons ... fabulous stuff. You really should try to stay awake to catch some of this."
She was fully awake now, and not feeling too happy about it. "I guess that means that nobody's come up with any good ideas yet on how I might get down."
"Uh ... what do you mean?"
"Because if they had, you wouldn't be so goddamned upbeat, would you?"
"_Some_body woke up on the wrong side of the bed," Alan said. "Please remember that there are certain words we don't use in public."
"I'm sorry," Consuelo said. "I was just trying to -- "
" -- distract me. Okay, fine. What the hey. I can play along." Lizzie pulled herself together. "So your findings mean ... what? Life?"
"I keep telling you guys. It's too early to make that kind of determination. What we've got so far are just some very, very interesting readings."
"Tell her the big news," Alan said.
"Brace yourself. We've got a real ocean! Not this tiny little two-hundred-by-fifty-miles glorified lake we've been calling a sea, but a genuine ocean! Sonar readings show that what we see is just an evaporation pan atop a thirty- kilometer-thick cap of ice. The real ocean lies underneath, two hundred kilometers deep."
"Jesus." Lizzie caught herself. "I mean, gee whiz. Is there any way of getting the robofish down into it?"
"How do you think we got the depth readings? It's headed down there right now. There's a chimney through the ice right at the center of the visible sea. That's what replenishes the surface liquid. And directly under the hole, there's -- guess what? -- volcanic vents!"