When Tuck Benedict and David Torm faced each other on the bleak and frigid face of Titan, Saturn’s sixth moon, they represented, literally, the opposite ends of the universe. For in the twenty-second century, Tuck represented the rich and easy civilization of an Earth that had grown luxurious by utilizing solar energy through a catalytic mineral produced in Titan s grim mines.
David Torm, whose ancestors had been exiled to Titan centuries before, stood for the hardened Titan colonists who huddled beneath their airtight dome to mine the metal responsible for Earth’s prosperity. Meeting on the eve of an open revolt by the Titan miners against Earth s authority, these two teen-agers found grounds for friendship that their bickering fathers could never see.
This story of why the miners hated Earthlings, how they planned to ruin Earth and escape from the solar system gives this book its thrilling plot. The search for their means of escape from Titan’s airless surface made by Tuck and David is a thrill-a-minute adventure interspersed with desperate attempts to prevent armed revolt and makes Trouble on Titan an unusual and thought-provoking tale of tomorrow.
—The John C. Winston Company
Philadelphia and Toronto
The Author
Alan Nourse claims that the idea for Trouble on Titan was born at a New Year s Eve party in Philadelphia. It came out of a three-cornered conversation that dealt with jazz and a college musical fantasy. The plot idea had progressed so far that it was outlined on New Year s Day. “Essentially,” says the author, “it is an adventure story built oil a background of established science, but taking off imaginatively where known science ends. If the reader finds excitement and adventure and, at the same time, food for thought and consideration, the book will be well worth the writing.”
Born in Des Moines, Iowa, a veteran of World War II, Alan Nourse devotes only part of his time to science fiction. Though he has had his science fiction appear in such well-known magazines as Astounding Science Fiction, Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and Galaxy Science Fiction, his major interest is medicine, which he’s studying now at the University of Pennsylvania.
The Editors
Cecile Matschat, editor of the Winston Science Fiction series, is recognized as one of this country’s most skilful writers and editors. She has sixteen books to her credit, including the highly praised Suwannee River in the “Rivers of America” series. Nationally known as a lecturer, an artist of great ability, Cecile Matschat is also an expert historian. With this varied background, she is perfectly suited to select top science fiction authors and books to make this a balanced and well-rounded series.
Carl Carmer, consulting editor, holds an outstanding position in the literary world. Author of Stars Fell on Alabama, he now edits the popular “Rivers of America” series. Other of his books are Genesee Fever, For the Rights of Man, Listen for a Lonesome Drum, and Windfall Fiddle.
Title Page
A Science Fiction Novel
Trouble on Titan
By Alan E. Nourse
Jacket and Endpaper Designs by Alex Schomburg
Cecile Matschat, Editor Carl Carmer, Consulting Editor
THE JOHN C. WINSTON COMPANY
Philadelphia • Toronto
Copyright Page
Copyright, 1954
By Alan E. Nourse
Copyright in Great Britain
and in the British Dominions
and Possessions
Copyright in the Republic of the
Philippines
Jacket Illustration by Alex Schomburg
First Edition
Made in the United States of America
L. C. Card #54-5067
Dedication
To JOE for
his help along the way
I’ve Never Been There
One of the most exciting things about science fiction, both reading it and writing it, is the freedom of imagination it offers to both the reader and the writer.
Its perfectly true that adventure stories, and Indian stories, and mystery stories, and stories of history and exploration are imaginative. I’d be the last to deny it But they all have strings attached. We know a great deal about the Indians, for instance—historical facts, figures, geographical data, biographies. We can’t make Sitting Bull a Navaho. We can’t write a story about the Indians that violates any of the known facts about them, and if we read a story that does, we toss the book aside and say, “That fellow isn’t much of a writer—” But in science fiction, neither the writer nor the reader has any such narrow limitations.
Perhaps I’d better modify that just a little, before the tried-and-true science fiction readers start crawling down my throat. There are limitations in science fiction which the readers demand, and which the writers must obey. But the limitations are different in science fiction—and it’s that difference that makes these stories so exciting to me.
I think Trouble on Titan is a good story to illustrate my point. Basically, this is a free-wheeling adventure story. But in writing it, I could not violate what is already proved, known fact about the background where the story is set, or the events in the course of the story. If my book had been set in San Francisco during the great earthquake, I’d have been very limited in the picture I could have painted with the story. But it wasn’t set in San Francisco. It was set on Titan, the fifth moon of Saturn—and here, my friends, we can take off with a vengeance. Because I’ve never been on Titan—and neither has anybody else!
In planning the story, I had to ask myself, “What do we really know about Titan?” A surprising amount, for a place we’ve never come close to approaching. We know, for instance, that it is a moon, circling the sixth planet of our Solar System much the same as our Moon circles the Earth. We know that it has at least eight brother and sister moons circling the same planet: Mimas, Enceladus, Tethys, Dione, Rhea, Hyperion, Japetus, and Phoebe. We even know that it might have another—Themis, which was reported by Professor Pickering in 1905, and has not been seen since. But of all these moons, we know that Titan is the largest, approximately 3,550 miles in diameter (compared to our own Moons 2,160 miles in diameter). We know that Titan makes one complete revolution around Saturn in a period of 15.94 days, that its mean distance from its planet is 759,000 miles, and that of all the moons of Saturn, Titan is the only one that has an atmosphere.
Well, that still gave me room enough to move around quite a bit. What kind of atmosphere could we look for on Titan? By use of the spectrograph, astronomers have determined that it contains large amounts of methane. The astronomers suspect ammonia, too, as well as cyanogen and water vapor. In short, a thoroughly poisonous atmosphere very similar to, but less dense than, that of Saturn herself. Further, since the structure of Saturn, like Jupiter and Uranus, is probably a huge core of rock and mineral material surrounded by a thick ice pack and an outer blanket of volatile material, it’s safe to assume that Titan would be a rather large and bitterly cold chunk of rock and metal.