I am pleasantly surprised Jiaying does not consider the night we spent together as a one-time event. The shift system prevented them from seeing each other all the time, but last evening she had invited him to a return visit to her cabin. Martin smiled.
He thought of the new crew member who had quickly become the star of the team. When the commander starts her shift bleary-eyed because the little one has not wanted to sleep, there is always someone who enables her to nap for an hour by taking care of the baby. Amy had been able to nurse from day one. The low gravity seemed to be no problem in that respect. Marchenko was very satisfied with how things were developing. This baby must be the most supervised infant in the entire solar system, and Jiaying is always happy to take care of him. “So cute,” she always said, even though everyone already knew what she thought about the baby.
However, the improvised diapers drove the parents crazy. Their absorptive capacity was low. While on Earth each liquid took the shortest path downward, under low gravity the baby’s digestive products sometimes moved in other directions. It was impossible to avoid a mess. At breakfast, Hayato regularly shared the details of these unfortunate instances, where everything had spread out during the previous night, and on what surprising body parts he’d had to apply the cleaning cloths. The women present pitied the new father—as if the mother did not face the same problems.
Hayato and Amy still had not mentioned the baby’s name. They claimed to have agreed on a name, but they wanted to reveal it during a small ceremony. Martin was surprised how well they managed not to let the name slip out. They seem to enjoy the secrecy.
Martin twitched and hit his head on the round metal frame of the porthole. I really shouldn’t doze off during work. He slapped his cheeks to become fully awake. The impulse he had felt was obviously caused by the drives that had just ignited. Until just now, the spaceship had been moving weightlessly through space. This meant they had reached the point closest to Saturn. During the next orbit they would not get as close to the planet, but they would be able to see Enceladus more clearly.
December 12, 2046, ILSE
The white ball on the fog display was so bright Martin shaded his eyes. Today was a special day, and therefore they all were meeting in the command module. Amy even brought the baby along. He slept inside a cloth the commander had wrapped around her chest. In a few minutes, the spaceship would stop circling the ringed planet Saturn. Instead, it was about to become a satellite of the bright ball of ice they were seeing on their display.
This was a task no vehicle built by humans had ever achieved. Enceladus only had a diameter of 505 kilometers, about the distance from New York to Pittsburgh as the crow flies, and its mass was 1/6000 that of Earth. This meant its gravity was relatively very low. In order to avoid overshooting Enceladus, ILSE must decelerate to 850 kilometers per hour relative to the Saturn moon. From a cosmic perspective, this meant almost a complete standstill. Nonetheless, while it still orbited Saturn it could not reduce its absolute velocity at random, as otherwise it ran the risk of crashing into the planet. Watson had calculated a slightly ellipsoidal course, during which the ship’s speedometer would indicate 53,000 kilometers per hour near Enceladus—if it had a speedometer.
Therefore, the task of the ship was to decelerate as quickly as possible, without endangering the passengers, and swing into an orbit around an object racing away from them at 43,500 kilometers per hour.
“Imagine a motorcyclist having to circle around a car that is going 90 kilometers per hour, while he himself is zooming along the highway at 130 kilometers per hour.” That is how Martin explained to Jiaying what the ship was supposed to do today.
“Of course this is a misleading comparison,” he added, when he saw the horror on his girlfriend’s face. “It’s no problem at all for the DFDs, don’t you worry.”
“Wouldn’t it have been easier to keep us in orbit around Saturn? Didn’t that work well with the other Enceladus space probes?” Jiaying is a biologist and geologist, and you can have great discussions with her about minerals and the origin of life, but she really does not know much about navigation.
“If it had only been about landing there, maybe it would have been,” Martin said. “It might have worked to drop a lander and then fly on. But imagine the return trip. The lander module takes off from Enceladus and has to link up with a ship zooming past it at 48,000 kilometers per hour …”
“Okay,” Jiaying said.
“And then we would have a problem concerning the energy supply for Valkyrie,” Martin explained. “We need the ship in a stationary orbit so that it can beam energy down via laser. Otherwise, we would have had to land a power station on Enceladus as well. At thirty tons, the lander module is already heavier than all prior Enceladus probes added together.”
“Please secure yourselves in your seats,” the commander announced. Her voice sounded higher than usual. The deceleration would for the first time create more than terrestrial gravity, so they would have to buckle in as they had done the last time on Earth. During the maneuver, the drives would be utilized far outside their normal parameters for a few seconds. Hayato, the resident expert, assured them this would not damage the drive system.
“Deceleration in 30.”
Then Watson started a countdown to zero. Martin’s own inertia pressed him against the back of his seat. He looked to the left, where Enceladus was slowly moving into the porthole. The commander’s little son started to cry. The moon appeared to be moving slower and slower, until it finally seemed to stand still. Then it was all over.
“Welcome to our destination,” the commander announced. One can tell she is still under a lot of stress, Martin observed. “We have reached a stable orbit around Enceladus. I think we should all relax for the rest of the day. Tomorrow we are going to pick a landing site, and the day after that we go down.”
December 13, 2046, ILSE
Martin stood in a supermarket watching a robot dog. This was the latest craze for boys like him. The animal recognized its owner and learned to respond to commands, just like a real dog. But, you did not have to take it for walks, and it only needed electricity as food, and it could do tricks no ‘real’ dog would ever master. It jumped higher, ran faster, and only barked when its owner gave the order.
Martin circled the artificial dog. He walked through the aisles so that now and then he caught a glimpse of it. He really would have liked to purchase the dog, but he did not have enough money. The circles he walked around the dog got tighter and tighter. He asked himself, Should I just put the animal under my jacket and run out of the store? He wasn’t afraid of getting caught, but he worried the animal would be damaged if he stumbled and fell. Is the dog looking at me? Martin knew this artificial creature could recognize humans. Does it recognize me? Why does its gaze follow me, of all people? There were so many other customers in the store. Martin moved closer.
“Hello,” the dog said. “Who are you?”
The TV commercial seemed to have left out the fact that the dog could talk.
“I am Martin.”