Trouble On Titan
Trouble On Titan
Alan Edward Nourse
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.
Trouble On Titan
by Alan E. Nourse
Introduction
Annotation
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 blanke
t of volatile material, it’s safe to assume that Titan would be a rather large and bitterly cold chunk of rock and metal.
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!
A. E. N.
Trouble on Titan
Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,
Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God s great Judgment Seat;
But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,
When two strong men stand face to face, though they come from the ends of the earth!
—Rudyard Kipling
From: “The Ballad of East and West” from departmental ditties and ballads and barrack-room ballads, by Rudyard Kipling, reprinted by permission of Mrs. George Bambridge and Doubleday & Company, Inc., and Messrs. Methuen & Co., Ltd., and The Macmillan Company of Canada.
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.
Happily, Tuck stared through the observation bay that opened almost to the floor alongside his feet. He was a sturdy-looking youth, rather slight of build, but wiry, and browned from the West Coast sun. His gray eyes were lively in a grave, thoughtful face, and his short brown hair had succumbed to a neat combing, perhaps for the first time in months, and only after long and diligent persuasion. As the jet motors hummed in his ears, he was far too excited to sleep again, and the minutes passed slowly. Far, far below, through the blanket of hazy white clouds, he caught a glimpse of the long, straight double ribbons of silver crossing the broad plains, the New York-Los Angeles Rolling Roads that carried the huge volumes of overland freight across the continent. Far to the north the Rocky Mountains
were giving way to rolling plains, and by squinting a good deal and watching closely he could just make out the great glowing dome of the Montana Solar Energy Converter. He had visited this great plant once, during the years at Prep, and he knew several of his classmates who had been accepted at the Solar Energy School in Helena, to study the theory and engineering behind Solar Energy Conversion. The great plants all over the world converted the enormous energy of the sunlight into heat, light and power to supply the luxurious cities and quiet suburban towns, and the ruthenium from the lonely outpost mining colony on Titan was the catalyst which made this energy conversion possible.
Yet for all its importance and complexity, Tuck could never have become interested in Solar Energy work as a career. For him there was only one field, only one work of importance, and he itched with impatience to get started, to begin the studies that would lead him to his goal.
It was not that there was anything so wonderful and new about rocket travel. The first rocket from Earth had reached the moon well over two hundred years before, in 1976. In a.d. 2180, the year that Tuck was born, the rocket ship Planet Nine had returned from Pluto, the farthest planet from the sun, with a complete file of maps, surface data, exploratory notes, and astronomical data on Pluto, as well as astro-photographs of the tenth planet that had been discovered skimming its frigid course still farther out in the blackness of space. A large farming colony had been thriving on Mars for a hundred and fifty years, and the great Solar Converter being built on Venus would soon be at work reconverting those arid deserts and windswept crags into a lush tropical paradise for farmers and vacationers. The exploration of the Solar System was almost complete, except for the mopping up—but there were other frontiers, greater frontiers, and these were the frontiers that excited Tuck. For beyond the limits of the Solar System lay the black wastes of deep space, the unbridgeable gulf that led to the stars. And someday, Tuck knew, some man would find a way to go to the stars—