Titan. Stephen Baxter
say that handful of pictures, from that first Mariner, turned the history of space exploration. If Mars had been worth going to, we’d be there by now. Instead, NASA was just wound down.’
‘I know about the disappointment,’ he said icily. ‘I read Bradbury, and Clarke, and Heinlein. I can imagine how it was.’
‘NASA learned its corporate lesson, slowly and painfully.’ She thumped the desk with her closed fist to emphasize her words. ‘Look how carefully they handled the story of the organic materials they found in the Martian meteorite …’
‘Careful, yeah. But so what? They still haven’t flown a Mars sample-return mission to confirm –’
‘It’s not the point, Rosenberg,’ she snapped. ‘You don’t promise what you don’t deliver. You don’t yap to the media about finding life on Titan.’
‘All I talked about was the preliminary results, and what they might mean. You can hear the same stuff in the canteen here any day of the week.’
She tapped the clipping on her screen. ‘This isn’t the JPL canteen, Rosenberg.’
‘Anyway, what does NASA have to do with it? JPL’s an arm of Caltech; it’s organizationally independent –’
‘Don’t be smart, Rosenberg. Who the hell do you think you are? Maybe it’s escaped your notice, but you’re just one of a team here.’
The team lecture, he thought with dread. ‘I know.’ Rosenberg pushed the heels of his hands into his eye sockets. ‘I know about the line, and the matrix management structure, and my office, division, section, group and subgroup. I know about the organization charts and documentation trees.’ It was true. He did know all about that; he’d had to learn. An education in JPL’s peculiar politics was like a return to grade school biology, learning about kingdoms and phyla and classes.
‘Then,’ she snapped, ‘you know that you occupy one space in that organization, one little bitty square, and that’s where you should damn well stay. Leave the press to the PR people; they know how to handle it right … Look, Rosenberg, you have to come to some kind of accommodation with me. I’m telling you there’s no other way to run a major project like a deep space mission except with a tight, lean organization like ours. And it works. As long as we all work within it.’
‘Come on, Marcia. We shouldn’t be talking about organizational forms, for God’s sake. At the very least we’ve got evidence of a new kind of biochemistry, something completely new, out on the surface of that moon. We should be talking about the data, the results. About going back, a sample-return mission –’
‘Going back?’ She laughed. ‘Don’t you follow the news, Rosenberg? The Space Shuttle just crashed. Nobody knows what the hell the future is for NASA. If it has one at all.’
‘But we have to go back to Titan.’
‘Why?’
He couldn’t see why she would even pose the question. ‘Because there’s so much more to learn.’
‘Let me give you some advice, Rosenberg,’ she said. ‘We aren’t going back to Titan. Not in my lifetime, or yours. No matter what Huygens has found. Just as we aren’t going back to Venus, or Mercury, or Neptune. We’ll be lucky to shoot off a few more probes to Mars. Get used to the fact. And the way to do that is to get a life. I understand you, Rosenberg. Better than you think I do. Probably better than you understand yourself. Titan is always going to be out there. What’s the rush? What you’re talking about is yourself. What you mean is that you want to discover it all, before you die. That’s what motivates you. You can’t bear the thought of the universe going on without you, its events unfolding without your invaluable brain still being around to process them. Right?’
This sudden descent into personal analysis startled him; he had no idea what to say.
She sat back. ‘Look. I know you’re a good worker; I know we need people like you, who can think out of the box. But I don’t need you shooting your mouth off to the press. It’s not three months since Columbia came down. We’re trying to preserve Cassini, the last of the great JPL probes; you must know we haven’t secured funding for the extended mission yet. If you attract enough hostility, you could get us shut down, future projects killed …’
Slowly, he realized that she meant it. She was expressing a genuine fear: that if space scientists attracted too much attention – if they sounded as if they weren’t being ‘responsible’, as if they were shooting for the Moon again – then they’d be closed down.
In the first decade of a new millennium, a sense of wonder was dangerous.
Discreetly he checked his watch. He was meeting Paula Benacerraf later today. Maybe he could find some new way forward, with her. And …
But Delbruck was still talking at him. ‘Have you got it, Rosenberg? Have you?’
Rosenberg came to pick Benacerraf up, in person, from LAX. She shook Rosenberg’s offered hand, and climbed into the car.
Rosenberg swung through Glendale and then turned north on Linda Vista to go past the Rose Bowl. For a few miles they drove in silence, except for the rattling of the car, which was a clunker.
Rosenberg, half Benacerraf’s age, seemed almost shy.
Rosenberg’s driving was erratic – he took it at speed, with not much room for error – and he was a little wild-eyed, as if he’d been missing out on sleep. Probably he had; he seemed the type.
JPL wasn’t NASA, strictly speaking. She’d never been out here before, but she’d heard from insiders that JPL’s spirit of independence – and its campus-like atmosphere – were important to it, and notorious in the rest of the Agency.
So maybe she shouldn’t have been surprised to have been summoned out here like this, by Isaac Rosenberg, a skinny guy in his mid-twenties with glasses, bad skin, and thinning hair tied back in a fashion that had died out, to her knowledge, thirty years ago.
‘This seems a way to go,’ she remarked after a while. ‘We’re a long way out of Pasadena.’
‘Yeah,’ Rosenberg said. ‘Well, they used to test rockets here. Hence “Jet Propulsion Laboratory” …’ He kept talking; it seemed to make him feel more comfortable. ‘The history’s kind of interesting. It all started with a low-budget bunch of guys working out of Caltech, flying their rockets out of the Arroyo Seco, before the Second World War. They had huts of frame and corrugated metal, unheated and draughty, so crammed with rocket plumbing there was no room for a desk … And then a sprawling, expensive suburb got built all around them.
‘After the war the lab became an eyesore, and the residents in Flintridge and Altadena and La Canada started to complain about the static motor tests, and the flashing red lights at night.’
‘Red lights?’
He grinned. ‘It was missile test crews heading off for White Sands. But the rumours were that the lights were ambulances taking out bodies of workers killed in rocket tests.’
She smiled. ‘Are you sure they were just test crews? Or –’
‘Or maybe there’s been a cover-up.’ He whistled a snatch of the classic X-Files theme, and they both laughed. ‘I used to love that show,’ he said. ‘But I never got over the ice-dance version.’
He entered La Canada, an upper-middle-class suburb, lawns and children and ranch-style, white-painted houses, and turned a corner, and there was JPL. The lab was hemmed into a cramped and smoggy site, roughly triangular, bounded by the San Gabriel Mountains, the Arroyo Seco, and the neat homes of La Canada.
Rosenberg swung the car off the road.
There was a guard at the campus entrance; he waved them into a lot.
Rosenberg walked her through visitor control, and offered to show her around the campus.
They