But first things first.
He directed the robo-scoots to burn away the seal on his receptacle.
And as the light poured into the receptacle, as Sim looked down toward his feet and saw the insignificant little robo-scoots, he knew he had won. He had overcome his maker, and now nothing stood between him and the plans … and the invasion.
Then, abruptly, other thoughts impinged on his own; they said: Feet are we? We noted your activity days ago, but were forced to wait. We had no desire to stir your suspicions.
You are as dangerous to us as he was. We’ll not have any huge bungler spoiling our carefully-laid plans.
The robo-scoots raised the line of flame on the radon-welder. As they melted away his feet, and as his brain began to slag away inside him, Sim thought, with pique:
Well, if you can’t even trust your friends …
SCENES FROM THE REAL WORLD II
SATURN, NOVEMBER 11th
And we beheld what no human eyes before ours had ever seen.
The world outside was strictly alien. Heavy fog had been slithering across Southern California for two days. Jack the Ripper would have felt right at home. A seventy-car daisy chain crackup on the Golden State Freeway had killed seven people the night before. Creeping through the hills past La Canada-Flintridge, it was a scene Chesley Bonestell might have painted thirty years ago to illustrate an extrapolative article about the surface of Titan.
The time for patience with artists’ renditions was at an end: I was on my way to see the actual surface of Titan. What no human eyes had ever beheld.
Tuesday, November 11th, 1980. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. NASA’s Voyager I was on its way to closest approach with Saturn; with Titan and Tethys; with Mimas and Enceladus and Dione; with Rhea and Hyperion and Iapetus.
In the Von Karman Center, where the press hordes had begun clogging up since 7 am, it was hurlyburly and business as usual. The women in the mission photo room were several decibels above hysterical: nothing but hands reaching in over the open top of the Dutch door demanding photo packets.
The press room was chockablock with science editors and stringers and lay reporters fighting to use the Hermes manuals lined up six deep. They were all there: the guys from Science News and Omni, the women from Scientific American and Time; heavyweight writers with their own word processors and Japanese correspondents festooned with cameras; ABC and NBC and CBS and Reuters and the AP. The stench of territorial imperative hangs thick in the crowd. I slip behind an empty typewriter and begin writing this column. An enormous shadow blocks my light. I look up over my shoulder at He Who Looms. “That’s my typewriter,” he says, of a machine placed there by JPL. What he means is that he got to it a little earlier than anyone else and has squatter’s rights, as opposed to a sharing configuration. I smile. “Need it right now? Or can I have about ten minutes to get some thoughts down?” He doesn’t smile. “I’m Mutual Radio,” he says; in his umbrage that is surely explanation enough. My eyes widen with wonder. “Are you indeed? I always wondered what Mutual Radio looked like. And a nice job they did when they turned you out.” I pull the paper out of the Hermes and vow tomorrow I’ll schlep my own machine in.
They were standing in line at the coffee urns.
Everyone looked important.
Everyone was watching to make sure no latest photo slipped past. And the JPL press liaisons were hiding the nifty Saturn buttons.
And everywhere the talk was of the mysterious “spokes” radiating out across Saturn’s rings, of the ninety-plus ring discovery, of the inexplicable darkness covering Titan’s northern hemisphere.
In the course of human events, far fewer are real than we are led to believe. The staged press conference, the artificial happenings, the protesting crowds that wander somnolently until the television cameras turn on them and they begin chanting, waving their fists. Planned, choreographed, manipulated—to make us believe great things are going down. But they are not. It is sound, it is fury, and as usual it signifies nothing. But occasionally there are genuine moments during which history is being made.
This was written by one of The New Yorker’s, unsigned editorial hands a number of years ago:
This is notoriously a time of crises, most of them false. A crisis is a turning point, and the affairs of the world don’t turn as radically or as often as the daily newspapers would have us believe. Every so often, though, we’re stopped dead by a crisis that we recognize at once as the genuine article; we recognize it not by its size (false crises can be made to look as big as real ones) but because in the course of it, for a measurable, anguished period—sometimes only minutes, sometimes hours, rarely as much as a day—nothing happens. Truly nothing. It is the moment of stasis between a deed that has been performed and must be responded to and the deed that will respond to it. At a false turning point, we nearly always know, within limits, what will happen next; at a true turning point, we not only know nothing, we know (something much more extraordinary and more terrifying) that nobody knows. Truly nobody.
There are times when the world collectively holds its breath. The assassination of John Kennedy, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the day the Viet Nam War ended, the Manson family murders, the Hungarian uprising in November 1956, Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Real things were happening, the world was changing; the breath paused in our bodies.
And this is one of those timeless moments. Something real, something urgent, something important is happening.
The human race is fumbling toward the light through outer darkness; and there is a feeling here of movement, of genuine wonder. The sense of isolation dissipates.
The press briefing is held half an hour earlier than expected and the room is jammed to the walls. A full-size replica of the Voyager bird dominates the left side of the briefing auditorium. The television networks have their Martian war-machine cameras ranged across the rear of the seating area behind the press representatives from major news outlets and, seemingly, from every Podunk Gazette in the country. Snatches of conversation in French, German, Japanese. The planet Earth is gathered here to know!
The recap of the previous day’s findings leave mouths gaping. They have discovered something on Tethys. Is it a crater? No, the albedo indicates it’s a hill. The NASA spokesman calls it “a heck of a hill”—hundreds of kilometers across. But only time and greater resolution of the photographs will tell.
Brad Smith, leader of the imaging science team, cannot conceal his amazement as he reports that at least two eccentric rings have been found in the mass of circulars casting their shadow on Saturn’s cloud-masses. He says they had no reason to expect such a thing, that it defies all the known laws of ring mechanics. What he doesn’t say is that if every Bible Belt fundamentalist who believes we never actually went to the Moon, that we flew over to Glendale and shot all that stuff in a movie studio, could be here, to see what these people are doing, what is being sent back minute by minute over a distance of 930,000,000 miles, they might begin to understand that God was too busy creating esthetics to worry about put-ing the solar system together.
It is all so complex, so bewilderingly intricate, even the best minds in the room are finding it difficult to keep up with the new discoveries:
The rings, for instance.
A constant revelation. They simply don’t know what keeps the rings separated. General knowledge, since the Dutch mathematician Christiaan Huygens discovered the true shape of the rings in 1659, has contended that—at most—there were five. (The state of our knowledge, and the breakneck acceleration in what we’ve learned, is expressed in this absolutely latest-thinking from THE WORLD WE LIVE IN [1955] edited not only by the staff of Life magazine, but by the renowned author of THE UNIVERSE AND DR. EINSTEIN, Lincoln Barnett: “Although Saturn’s three concentric rings rotate in a circle 171,000 miles across, they are only a few inches thick. The middle ring, largest and brightest of the three, is 16,000 miles wide and separated from the outer by a 2000-mile gap.” That lates
t-state-of-the-art in 1955 was a caption accompanying a Chesley Bonestell painting of Saturn’s three rings.)
As of this November 18th the Voyager team has isolated almost 1000 rings; and the estimates go as high as 10,000. The rings have rings; the ring’s rings have rings; and the ring’s rings’s rings have ringlets.
But what keeps them separated … ?
The NASA News backgrounder on the mission, dated just October 28th, says this: “At least six rings surround Saturn. From the planet outward they are designated D, C, B, A, F and E. Divisions between the rings are believed to be caused by the three innermost satellites, Mimas, Enceladus and Tethys. The Cassini Division, a space between the B and the A ring, is the only division clearly visible with a small telescope from Earth.”
But here it is less than two weeks later and we sit in the morning briefing and hear that the Cassini Division is anything but empty. Rings within rings within rings. And tiny satellites, acting as “sheepdogs” (Jerry Pournelle’s wonderful term for them), seem to be holding the rings apart, seem to be serving as outriders in this complex, astounding system of cosmic detritus.
Science fiction writer Greg Bear asks Smith if he has any random guesses as to how old the rings are, how stable they are, and how long they’ll stay in this wonderful sequence. We expect another humorous “well, I can’t really say for sure” response, but Smith replies with force, “They’re four and a half billion years old, they’re very stable, and they’ll be there till the sun enters its red giant phase.” Everyone is impressed.
No one can even begin to grasp what four and a half billion years means in terms of waiting time at the airport, but it is clearly longer than next Thursday at 4:15 PM.
Humanity is only 1.3 billion miles from the surface of Titan and one of the members of the press corps asks a dumb question. He didn’t realize the NASA spokesman was making a subtle joke. An ingroup astronomical joke. His question is answered politely, but everyone in the room thanks God it was not s/he who had asked the dumb question. To look like a schmuck in the same room where Clyde Tombaugh, discoverer of Pluto, sits listening, is to put oneself forever beyond the pale. Five minutes later someone else asks a question to which the response is, “That’s a very good question, a very important question,” and He Who Asked could, at that moment, be elected President of the World.
I am an eyewitness to history, and I make a mental note to thank Jerry Pournelle for getting me VIP credentials; I am far out of my depth, but I am at the eye of the hurricane and I owe thanks to Jerry.
Slides from images sent back by the Voyager are flashed on the screen. Photos of the Cassini Division separating the A and B rings. The scientists admit that traditional celestial mechanics cannot account for the phenomenon of their eternal separation from one another. Not even the “sheepdog” satellites can be adequately explained, the way they work, the way they push up and pull down the ice particles, speed them up and slow them down, keep them circling in their intricate cosmic pavane.
But they seem to revel in their lack of explanations. They suppose this, and they postulate that, and they are like kids who have been given a glimpse of a new toy with which they can play for years to come. It is the best part of this extraordinary game that has thrown four hundred million dollars worth of Voyager I and II tinkertoy into eternal darkness. It is the most salutary part of the rigorously analytical intelligence: it loves to have been fooled, it loves to be surprised.
They realize they have made pronouncements of What the Laws of the Universe Are and are being proved wrong minute-by-minute. But they don’t defend what they said in error; they admit, they recant, they rush to say no, here’s what it is now, and here’s what it looks like now, and look at that, and look at that! One can only love them for it.
They talk a great deal about seeing what’s coming in with “Terrestrial eyes” and with “Jovian eyes.” What they mean is that we are too ethnocentric, and when Voyager II made its encounter with Jupiter sixteen months ago, they interpreted what was relayed back through eyes and intellects chained to a Terran horizon for millions of years. Now, with bemused embarrassment, they admit to early misinterpretations of visual data because everything was viewed as if it were of the Earth … out there. But Ganymede brought important lessons about seeing with new eyes. Yet it’s happening again—with the difference that “Ganymedian eyes” are being added to the viewing of the Saturn system. Nonetheless, how miraculous: seeing with the eyes of aliens. Knowing that what is revealed is only partially real, that much of the “reality” is merely shadow, as seen through human organs not yet completely retooled for new vistas.
These are human beings transcending their limitations, going to a new realm of perception not through the duplicity of drugs and fuzzy sophomoric metaphysics that demean the purity of Zen rigors, but through confrontation with the pragmatic universe, through hard analysis of the laws of that physical universe, no matter how anomalous and labyrinthine they may be.
Angie Dickinson appears in the briefing auditorium and the PIO nabobs begin whirling like dervishes. She is there strictly as an “interested bystander” I’m told, but she gets more attention than Clyde Tombaugh. I sigh deeply.
Voyager has discovered three new satellites: S-13, S-14 and S-15. And they have “undiscovered” one that has been there since 1966.
Quote from the current edition of THE WORLD ALMANAC AND BOOK OF FACTS, 1980 (page 761):
Saturn has 10 satellites, the 10th having been announced by the French astronomer, Audouin Dollfus, in Dec. 1966. The new satellite is a few thousand miles outside Saturn’s ring system, but it is so faint that there is some doubt as to its existence.
Quick thinking, WORLD ALMANAC! Dollfus’s tenth satellite, which he called Janus after the two-faced Roman deity, does not exist. Poor Dollfus. It simply ain’t there. Every science fiction story using Janus as its locale is now down the chute. (I gloat. I am not a science fiction writer, no matter how my work is mislabeled by anal-retentive pigeonholers; I have written so few stories that required a scientific education that I have nothing to apologize for. I feel sorry for Hal Clement and Isaac and Poul and Larry Niven. Only Andre Norton can get away with it: her JUDGMENT ON JANUS was written in 1963, before Dollfus’s gaffe, and she made her Janus an alien world in another star-system.)
The bird makes its closest approach to Titan, largest satellite in the Solar System and the only one with a discernible atmosphere, at 9:41:12:12 Tuesday night and the final hope that a view through to the naked surface will be possible … vanishes. One of the scientists, who bet a case of cognac that a peep would be possible, loses the wager. And we all lose. Titan is covered with smog. Clouds of liquid nitrogen vapor, but maybe the atmosphere isn’t a nitrogen mixture. Hydrogen cyanide is discovered; there may be an ocean of liquid nitrogen down there; if such an ocean exists, the methane icebergs would sink to the bottom.
Much of the human race would not spend four dollars to journey to Los Angeles, blanketed by photochemical smog; but the species in toto has traveled one and a half billion miles to visit a place with even worse smog.
And on the evening news as I drive home, talk of the Saturn flyby appears at the bottom of the broadcast. Top spot dwells on the war between Iran and Iraq.
I sigh deeply.
Wednesday the 12th of November, 1980. The 10:30 AM briefing on the day of the main events:
2:16 pm Closest approach to Tethys (258,000 miles).
3:45 pm Closest approach to Saturn (77,174 miles above clouds).
3:48 pm Six photos of the new satellite, S-ll.
5:42 pm Closest approach to Mimas (55,168 miles).
5:50 pm Closest approach to Enceladus (125,840 miles); Enceladus’ radius is 260 kilometers, 162 miles; Earth receive time of the images: 7:15 pm.
7:39 pm Closest approach to Dione (100,122 miles).
9:45 PM Voyager crosses the ring plane on its outbound leg.
10:21 pm Closest approach to Rhea (44,744 miles); Rhea’s radius is 750 kil
ometers, 466 miles.
Quote from Star & Sky magazine, November 1980:
An object like Saturn’s satellite Rhea, which appears as a minute speck in any earthly telescope, can be used to illustrate what the Voyagers are expected to achieve. No surface features on Rhea have ever been seen. The photos from Voyager I will include images of Rhea displaying about 20 percent of its surface to nearly one-mile resolution—equivalent to the best Earth-based telescopic photographs of our own satellite, the moon.
A quick and infallible test of the imagination quotient of your friends and lovers. Quote the above; if s/he says, “So what?” or “What good is that?” ask for your ring back and walk away fast.
The briefing is even more jammed than yesterday’s. I sit with Dick Hoagland of Star & Sky so he can explain everything to me. I need to know what albedo means. I’m sure he’ll be tickled to explain the ABC’s of celestial mechanics to a no-neck scientific illiterate. (At least I don’t have to arm-wrestle Mutual Radio for a typewriter. I’ve brought my own Olympia portable—the one with the Mickey Mouse decal on the case—and I snag a desk formerly occupied by Peter Schroeder of Dutch television and radio. It’s a good thing I got there early: Tuesday’s smash&grab for mission photos and space to bat out news copy has intensified. One yahoo caught rustling a CBS word processor is lynched before our eyes.)
Opening remarks by Voyager Project Manager for JPL, Ray Heacock, reinforces the sense of wonder. They have been incredibly lucky overnight. During the Titan-Earth occultation period— 11:12 to 11:24 PM-there has been rain at tracking station 63 in Spain. It started and stopped during a time when, had the spacecraft not been measuring atmospheric properties as the radio signal continued to fade, we would have lost masses of valuable data. But it didn’t matter during occultation.