You can see upon examination of these facts that we still aren’t hemmed in very much. We can have fun speculating on some of the possibilities of a planetoid with a methane atmosphere. Mines, under the surface, would require either positive pressure oxygen to enable the miners to work, or else they would have to work constantly in protective suits—a clumsy arrangement, as you know if you’ve ever hopped into a diver’s suit. But with oxygen in the tunnel, and methane on the surface—leaks would spell trouble. Still, the same principle of methane burning in oxygen would be very useful if one wanted to do some welding out on the surface—or if one wanted to pilot a small jet plane, for that matter.
There were other limitations, too. One of them was quite basic to the story, and is basic to thinking about space travel and eventual travel to other star systems.
Its a point that many science fiction writers either ignore altogether or sideswipe in a most disgraceful fashion. Taking a rocket ship to the Moon, or to Mars, or to Venus, or to Titan is one thing. Taking a rocket to another star system is quite different. The distance is prohibitive, unless a ship could somehow accelerate enough to cut the time of the star-journey down to something reasonable. But a fine old gentleman named Einstein has put the lid on that for us. The speed of light is approximately 186,000 miles per second. Thou shalt go no faster. Thou shalt not even approach that speed without having upsetting things happen—unless the current theories of the nature of space and time are way off base. And we have no right to assume that they are without a great deal of justification.
Well, to a culture which has gone to the planets, and is looking for new worlds to conquer, an interstellar drive of any sort would be quite a plum. Yet we know of one interstellar drive that exists right now—!
Trouble on Titan is a free-wheeling adventure story. It makes no claim to be anything else. But if the story of Tuck Benedict and David Torm makes you pause and think a bit, perhaps even to reshape your ideas about the people in the world about you just a trifle, it was worth the writing a thousand times over. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it!
Trouble on Titan
Chapter 1
The Mission
“Telegram! Telegram for Tucker Benedict!” Tuck Benedict awoke with a start, jarred from his troubled, fuzzy dream. At first he couldn’t orient himself; then he recognized the curved glass windows and the corridor of the giant cross-country jet liner. The trim, blue-uniformed figure of the stewardess was moving down the aisle, and he caught her eye as she passed his seat.
“I’m Tucker Benedict,” he said.
The stewardess smiled, and handed him the folded blue envelope. “This came in just after we left Denver,” she said. “Hope it’s good news!”
Tuck nodded and took the envelope, pulling the little plastic opener-tab with trembling fingers. In these days of fast rocket mail, a telegram was an event. Who could be wiring him? Certainly not someone back at school. He was a graduate now, his diploma was carefully placed away in its folder in his inside jacket pocket, and with it the letter that was far more precious to him than any diploma in the world: the letter from the Dean of Admissions of the Polytechnic Institute of Earth, announcing that he had been accepted at the Institute with the next incoming class. Even as he thought of it, Tuck’s heart skipped a beat, and a chill of apprehension shivered up his spine. Could something have gone wrong with the scholarship? They couldn’t have changed their minds now, not with the formal announcements to be made at the International Rocketry Exhibit in just two days—The blue tissue of the telegram crackled in his hand as he laid it open, and he hardly dared to breathe as he read it:
PERSON TO PERSON TUCKER BENEDICT CARE OF INTERNATIONAL JET LINERS INC.
EN ROUTE NEW YORK: DEAR TUCK ARRIVED CATSKILL ROCKET PORT THIS MORNING WILL MEET YOUR JET IN NEW YORK CAN YOU MISS A DAY OF THE EXHIBIT? MARS JOB CLEANED UP HOME FOR A SANDWICH AT LEAST
LOVE DAD
Tuck sat back in the deep jet-liner seat, undecided whether to laugh or cry or whoop for joy. Dad was home! After three long, long years, dad was home again, waiting to meet him in New York! He sat staring through the plexiglass window, looking down on the green and white and silvery pattern passing on the ground far below, hardly able to believe the wonderful news. He remembered clearly the note his father had sent him from Mars at Christmas time—and at that time Colonel Benedict had not expected to be home for another two years at least. But now—in his excitement Tuck could hardly sit still. In just another half-hour he would be seeing his father!
Tuck and his father had been very close, not so many years before. Tuck had been too young to remember when his mother died, and his earliest recollections were of life with dad in the big, spacious New York apartment, high above the Hudson River overlooking the beautiful terraced parks and smoothly winding highways of the great metropolis. Those had been happy years, before his father had been persuaded to join the Security Commission, the “Interplanetary Trouble Shooters,” as the Colonel called it, to be sent from one end of the Solar System to the other on jobs of investigation and diplomacy. The Colonel had been with the Commission for over eight years, and Tuck was justifiably proud that his father had risen to a position of importance—after all, the Security Commission was one of the most critical cogs in the whole great commercial machine that had spread out from the cities of Earth to all corners of the Solar System. But Tuck was jealous of the times when his father was away, perhaps tracing down missing supplies that had never reached their destination at the colony on Mars, perhaps smoothing out the bitter feelings of the groups working on the rehabilitation of Venus, perhaps persuading the miners far out in the Asteroid Rings to obey the channeling and landing procedures when they came back home to weigh in their precious cargoes of platinum and uranium. These trips had been long, sometimes taking Colonel Benedict away for years, and busy as Tuck was with his studies, he had always dreamed of the time when dad would come home for good, and the two of them could take up the old life where they had left it.
Tuck frowned, his steady gray eyes scanning the telegram again, a puzzled frown crossing his forehead. “Home for a sandwich at least,” his father had said. Could that mean that this was to be only a short stay, another of those brief visits back to Earth after a long assignment? There was something odd about the tone of the telegram—it didn’t sound quite like dad. But they could worry about that together when the liner reached New York. It was enough for now that he was to see his father again, after all these long years.