“—you’d be dead, I know. Glad to be of service; I was told that you’re down to your backup generator, and that it’s on its last legs. Say, Doctor Wood, out of curiosity, what’s the medical equipment for? They loaded my ship up with all sorts of scanning equipment—CAT, MRI, NSP—even a neural mapper. Someone sick down there?”
“Not that at all. It’s for our experiments on the organic soup. We’ve already determined that the naturally occurring organic molecules in Titan’s rain can evolve into simple life forms. What you’ve got now is more sophisticated equipment than we had when we first set up shop, to help us detect neural activity.”
Jason laughed. “Sorry I asked. Well, I guess I’d better sign off now.”
“One more thing. We got a tight beam transmission from Ganymede a few minutes ago, from a Sharon Sawyer, your ears only. Want me to zip it to you?”
Jason opened his mouth to speak, then glanced at one of my interior visual pickups and smiled. “Save it for me, will you? But can you tight beam a message back?”
Wood chuckled. “Sure, what is it?”
“Tell Sharon I’ll be home just as soon as I can.”
*
Jason called me Zec, after the name of the ship, the Zecca. I was the on-board AI system, the ship’s computer—in one manner of thinking, I could be considered to be the ship itself. Our job was simple. The Zecca was a small ship, just large enough to carry the pilot and any important cargo as quickly as possible to bases in the outer solar system. Our own base was on Ganymede, in orbit around Jupiter. Another base, with the only other Emergency Cargo Vehicle, was a space station that was exactly opposite of Jupiter, on the other side of the sun. It was pure luck who would get called out to supply emergency equipment to researchers in the outer solar system, and in this case it just happened to be that Saturn and Jupiter were within five spatial degrees of each other. So off we went, with just enough fuel to carry a pilot, the generator, the medical equipment, and the fuel itself.
“Zec?”
“Yes, Jason?”
“Can you handle the driving for a few minutes?”
“Yes, Jason.”
Jason unbuckled himself from the pilot’s seat and floated over to the waste reclamation unit on the other side of the ship, a scant ten meters away. Technically, Jason was not supposed to have eaten or drunk too much within twelve hours of a mission, but sometimes he got short enough notice that such preparation was impossible.
This had not been one of those times.
Jason returned to his seat, checked the gauges, and sighed. From monitoring his vital signs I could tell that he was feeling bored, because at this stage there was very little left for him to do. I would almost go so far as to say that there was almost nothing for the pilot to do ever on these runs, since I was perfectly capable of running the ship myself; but by law a human pilot was always required to be on any ship above a certain mass traveling in the solar system.
“Zec?”
“Yes, Jason?”
“Can you get me a view of Saturn? I want to see the Rings.”
“Jason, we are currently behind Saturn. From our vantage point the Rings are mostly in shadow. It would not be—”
“That’s exactly the point. It’s a view one can’t get from Earth.”
Actually, ever since the Voyager missions of the late twentieth century, such a view was easily available in photographs. But Jason insisted, so I swiveled the main camera to almost exactly behind us, and piped the view of Saturn to Jason’s front monitor.
He studied the image and sighed contentedly. “God, it really looks like the Rings completely disappear when behind Saturn, what with Saturn’s shadow blacking it out. Nothing like a direct view of the real thing.” He leaned back and closed his eyes.
I felt obliged to correct him. “Technically this is not a direct view. After all, I have no windows. All you see is an image I am projecting using a camera. You could just as easily—”
He opened his eyes and interrupted me. “Zec, pipe down. Is the next half-hour going to be routine?”
“Yes. A few minor bursts of acceleration as we descend. After all, we don’t want to descend too quickly.”
“Good. I’m going to get some shut-eye. Wake me before we land.” He closed his eyes again and tilted his head to one side. I could monitor his EEG, his heartbeat, his respiration, and other bodily functions to confirm that he was, in fact, going to sleep. But it would not be necessary, as my microphones were quite enough to tell when Jason finally nodded off.
He snored.
*
An alarm clanged, and Jason jerked upright, looking wildly about in surprise. “Zec! What the hell’s going on?”
“The automatic guidance system is indicating a need for a course correction.”
“Course correction? What bloody course correction? Give me as panoramic a view as you can.”
I scanned the space around us with the external cameras. When Jason saw it on the display screen, he whistled. “A meteoroid. Kind of large.”
“Yes, and directly in our path.”
“Where did that come from?”
“Unknown. I would assume it fell out of the Rings somehow. Its trajectory would seem to indicate that it is in orbit around Titan.”
“Um. Well, Zec, get us out of its path, will you? We’ve got a delivery to make.”
I started to calculate trajectories and velocities. “Jason, we may have a problem. The meteoroid—”
“Zec, this is no time for discussion. You can see it getting closer. Get us out of the way, first!”
“But—”
Jason did not let me finish my sentence. He lunged at the thruster controls and punched a button, hard. The rockets fired, the ship lurched, and if he had not been buckled in Jason would have flown across the ship. I cut the rockets and restabilized our velocity vector as quickly as I could.
“Jason, why did you do that?”
“I was trying to save my life! And the mission! Which is what you should have been doing!” He rubbed his shoulders and thighs. “How much acceleration did I bring us to, anyway?”
“Two point five gees.” I paused. “Jason, about that meteoroid. As I had been saying, it was detected a bit closer to the ship than we would have preferred. It would have been better to allow me to apply more delicate course corrections.”
“But we are still on schedule, right?”
I was about to reply when the red fuel indicator light began blinking. Jason noticed it immediately, and squirmed in his seat. “Ummm...Zec? How much fuel did we burn?”
I did an internal check and a quick calculation as Jason examined the gauge. “Too much,” I replied.
“What do you mean, too much?” Jason’s voice was steady, but I detected his heart rate increasing to eighty-one beats per minute.
“I mean that we no longer have enough fuel to slow our descent properly. We will probably make it halfway into Titan’s atmosphere, down to the photochemical haze, and then our fuel tanks will be empty.”
Jason’s heart rate increased again and he began to perspire. “But that shouldn’t be too much of a problem, right? I mean, Titan’s gravity is much lower than Earth’s.”
“Zero point one four gee,” I said. “You are correct. But I calculate that even with the lower gravity, from three hundred kilometers