She saw again that wandering chunk of ice-covered rock that had blundered into Saturn’s gravity well. A fugitive from the Kuiper Belt, she told herself for the thousandth time; a Trans-Neptunian Object that got kicked out of its orbit all the way out there and fell into Saturn’s grip.
In the speeded-up video the icy rock dived past Saturn once, twice, and then looped around the planet to fall into an orbit within the rings.
“Extreme slo-mo,” Wunderly called to the lab’s computer.
The new arrival’s motion slowed to something like taffy being pulled on a cold day. Wunderly saw the rock plow into the B ring, the broadest and brightest of Saturn’s intricate complex of rings.
To be greeted by a flurry of ring creatures. Like glittering snowflakes they swarmed over the new arrival and began chewing it apart. Of course, Wunderly admitted silently, it looks like a blizzard engulfing the newcomer. It’s a big leap to say that those particles are alive, or have living creatures in them, directing them, steering them to the new ice chunk like a pack of scavengers swarming around a fresh carcass.
The top biologists back on Earth flatly refused to believe that the ring particles contained living creatures. Too cold for active biology, they claimed. What do they know? Wunderly grumbled to herself. So it’s near absolute zero in the rings; so what? Those Earthworms can sit in their campus offices and claim I haven’t proven they’re alive. Well, I’m going to. I’ve got to. My career depends on it.
That can’t be a natural, abiological reaction, she told herself as she watched the swarming ice particles eat through the new moonlet. It can’t be just natural abrasion. Those particles actively moved to the intruder and chewed it down to the bare rock. She backed up the video and watched it all happen again, in ultra-slow motion.
“Damn!” she said aloud. “Why don’t they believe me?”
She knew why. Sagan’s dictum: Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. She was claiming that there were living creatures in the ice particles of Saturn’s rings, and that they actively maintained the rings, kept them big and dynamic, despite the fact that particles were constantly bleeding off the inner edges of the rings and were pulled down into Saturn’s clouds in a perpetual snowfall.
Wunderly was convinced that if the rings weren’t being constantly added to by the deliberate actions of living creatures, they would have disappeared eons ago. Hell, she said to herself, Jupiter’s bigger than Saturn and its ring system is just a puny sliver of carbon particles. Soot. Same thing for Uranus and Neptune. Saturn’s rings are huge, beautiful, so bright that Galileo saw them with his dinky little telescope nearly five centuries ago.
But the big-shot biologists back Earthside won’t believe me until I can give them enough proof to choke a hippopotamus. And the only real evidence I’ve got is these views of the ring dynamics, and Gaeta’s dive through the rings. They won’t believe a stuntman’s testimony, even though the creatures almost killed Manny while he was in the rings.
My career hangs on this, she thought. My whole life. I’ve made an extraordinary claim. I need to get enough evidence to prove it’s true. Otherwise I’ll be finished as a scientist.
I need to send probes into the rings, Wunderly told herself. I need to study them close up, in real time. I need some biologists here, and some way to capture a sampling of the ring creatures. Otherwise nobody who matters will believe me.
She consoled herself by remembering Clarke’s First Law: When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
By elderly Clarke meant over thirty, for a physicist. That means I’ll be elderly in another year, Wunderly realized. With a weary sigh she told the computer to shut down the display. I’ve got to get help. I’ve got to get enough evidence to prove that I’m right and they’re wrong. But Urbain’s so warped over his precious Titan Alpha lander that he won’t even talk to me.
Wunderly sat alone in her silent laboratory, a chubby young woman with hair dyed brick red, wearing a shapeless knee-length tunic of sky-blue faux silk, wondering how she could get her superior’s attention long enough to get the help she so desperately needed.
Then she sat up straighter and smiled. Manny Gaeta! He went into the rings once. Maybe he’ll do it again—not as a stunt this time, but as a scientific expedition.
27 December 2095: Afternoon
The computations of time that humans use meant nothing on the cloud-shrouded shore of the frozen sea. Titan Alpha sat where it had landed, unmoving, uncommunicative. But not inert.
Its sensors were making measurements. Outside temperature-181 degrees Celsius. Atmospheric pressure 1,734 millibars. Atmospheric composition: nitrogen, methane, ethane, minor hydrocarbons and nitrogen compounds. Tactile pads in its treads reported on the tensile strength of the spongy ground. Infrared cameras swept across the landscape, recording the black snow that was sifting down from the dirty-orange clouds slithering sluggishly across the sky.
Titan Alpha’s internal logic circuits concluded that the broad expanse of dark and flat material down at the base of the bluffs must be an ice-crusted liquid of some sort. Microwave radar detected waves surging sluggishly beneath the crust, making it heave and crack. A sea. Priorities built into the central computer’s master program demanded that the sea’s composition be investigated. Titan Alpha fired a microsecond burst of ten megajoules from the laser mounted in the swivel turret on its roof. The mass spectrometer identified a host of chemical compounds in the ice evaporated by the laser: water ice mostly, but lots of methane and other hydrocarbons as well.
The command protocol built into the communications system called for transmitting these data through the main uplink antenna. But a subroutine in the computer’s master program prevented this. No communications outside. Store the data but do not communicate. Wait. Observe and wait.
“It’s what we call engineer’s hell,” said one of the engineers who had helped to design and build Titan Alpha. “Everything checks but nothing works.”
Urbain sat at the head of the conference table, outwardly calm and under control. Only the slight tic beneath his right eye betrayed the tension within him.
His eight lead engineers sat around the oval conference table. One of the conference room’s smart walls displayed schematics of Titan Alpha’s various systems: propulsion, electrical power, sensors, communications and more. Urbain had not invited his scientists to this meeting; the problem with Titan Alpha was one of engineering. Something had malfunctioned and it was up to his engineering staff to determine what had gone wrong and to fix it. Besides, the scientists would swamp the meeting with bright ideas they hatched on the spur of the moment and drive everyone to distraction.
He was surprised and annoyed, then, when the young woman who was supposed to be monitoring the satellite hovering over Titan Alpha’s landing site burst into the conference room.
“It fired the laser!” she fairly shouted without preamble or even asking pardon for interrupting the meeting. “Squirted off a shot into the Lazy H Sea.”
Urbain jumped to his feet. “Are you certain?”