Story Excerpt: Homecoming

The landing port at Titan had not changed much in five years. The ship settled down on the scarred blast shield, beside the same trio of squat square buildings, and quickly disgorged its scanty quota of cargo and lone passenger into the flexible tube that linked the loading hatch with the main building.

As soon as the tube disconnected, the ship screamed off through the murky atmosphere, seemingly glad to get away from Titan and head back to the more comfortable and settled parts of the Solar System.

The passenger, Sidney Lee, stood by the win-dow-wall of the main building and watched the ship disappear into the dark sky. He was tall and lean, all bone and tendon from life on moons with lower-than-Earth gravity, with graying dark hair and faintly haunted eyes set deep into a rough-hewn, weather-worn face. When the ship was nothing more than another star overhead, he turned and looked at the place.

Five years hadn’t made any difference, he thought. The single room of the main port building was unchanged: a little grimier, per-haps, more worn. But essentially unchanged. There were the same turnstiles and inspection machines, the same processing and handling gadgets for hardware and baggage, the same (it couldn’t be, but they looked the same) two bored techs sitting at the far end of the room, unwilling to lift an eyebrow unless specifically commanded to do so.

Lee walked over to the passenger processor and scanned his credentials into its reader. Its green light flickered in approval. At the same time, his lone bag slid along a conveyor belt and onto the pickup table.

With his credentials back inside his jacket and the bag in hand, Lee looked toward the two clerks. They were studiously avoiding his eyes, searching intently through some sched-ules that they kept on hand for just such emer-gencies.

“Sid! Hi!”

He turned at the sound of her voice.

“I’m sorry to be late,” she said, hurrying across the big empty room, “but we never know when the Ancient Mariner is going to arrive. It’s not a matter of whether it’ll be on schedule or not…just a question of guessing how late it’s going to be.”

He smiled at her. “Hello, Elaine. It’s good to see you again.”

She hadn’t changed either, and this time he was glad of it. She was still slim and young, her hair a reddish gold, her eyes gray-green. She was dressed with typical casualness: comforta-ble boots, dark slacks and sweater that out-lined her trim figure, and a light green scarf for a touch of color. Outwardly, at least, she seemed cheerful.

“Come on,” she said, “I’ve got a car in the parking area. I wanted to get a few more of the old gang to come out and meet you, but there’s not many of them left, and they’re all pretty busy….” Her voice trailed off.

“I wasn’t expecting a key to the city,” Lee said. Then he added, “You’re pretty joyful for a scientist,” he said.

“I’m always joyful when I meet old friends again.”

He said nothing.

“I wish you’d cheer up,” Elaine said.

“I will; give me time.”

They entered the parking building and got in-to the car. Elaine selected the previously en-tered destination it automatically slid out of the near-empty parking area, through the pres-sure doors, and into Titan’s unbreathable at-mosphere.

“Have you been here straight through since I left?” he asked.

“No. I spent about eighteen months on Rhea, helping develop their atmospheric solution.”

“And?”

“And that’s it,” she said, shrugging. “Some-thing ventured but nothing found. So, I asked to be returned here.”

“It’s got you, too, hasn’t it?”

Her face became serious for the first time. “Certainly, it’s got me. It’s got all of us. Do you think we’d stay out here otherwise?”

“Anything new turned up?”

Elaine shook her head. “Nothing you haven’t seen in the reports. Which means nothing, real-ly.”

He lapsed into silence and watched the fro-zen landscape slide by as the car raced along Titan’s only highway. They crossed a bleak, frozen plain, bluish-white in the dim twilight from the distant Sun. The stars twinkling in the dark sky overhead made the barren scene look even colder. The road climbed across a row of hills, and as they made a turn around the high-est bluff, Saturn came into view.

No matter how many times Lee had seen the planet, it had always thrilled him. Now, five years later, it was still an experience. Three times larger than the full moon as seen from Earth, daubed with brilliant yellow, red and orange stripes, and circled about its middle by the impossible-looking rings, Saturn hung fat and low on the horizon, casting shadows stronger than the Sun’s.

“It’s a compensation, isn’t it?” Elaine said.

Soon they were down on the plain again, but now it was a shattered, broken expanse of jag-ged rock and ice. A greenish methane cloud drifted over the face of Saturn, and Lee finally turned his eyes away.

“You can see the towers from here,” Elaine reminded him.

“I know,” he said. He could not make out any detail, but there they were, just as they had been for—how long? Ten thousand years? A hundred thousand? Five towers jutting straight up from the bleak plain, clustered around a central, taller tower.

“Is the…machinery…still running?” he asked, pointlessly.

“Of course.”

“There was some talk a year or so back about trying to stop it.”

She shook her head. “They wouldn’t dare.”

The mega-engine had been discovered more than ten years earlier, when the first humans landed on Titan. Saturn’s largest satellite was devoid of life, a world of dark and cold, of hydrogen atmosphere and methane clouds, of ammonia seas and ice mountains.

And there in the midst of it all stood the ma-chine: a brazenly unconcealed cluster of mammoth buildings, with its five stately towers surmounted by the soaring central sixth. And within, row upon row of unexplained fully au-tomated systems, operating continuously, per-fectly.

Alien.

The discoverers soon concluded that the ma-chine was unbelievably old, older than the Egyptian pyramids, perhaps even older than the human history. And it ran smoothly. For untold centuries, for uncounted millennia, it had continued to operate efficiently, tended only by automatic hardware and, presumably, software.

A clear challenge to the space-rovers from Earth. Who made this machine? How does it work? Why is it here? What is it doing?

As soon as its discovery was made known, the machine was visited by a steady stream of physicists, archeologists, and engineers of a thousand different specialties, followed by sol-diers and politicians who were now forced to believe the inevitable. The machine was pho-tographed; radioed, x-rayed; blueprinted; ther-mal-scanned, and analyzed spectroscopically, philosophically, even theologically.

Who built it? How does it work? Why is it here?

No answers.

Sidney Lee, a chemical engineer who had made a name for himself by unraveling the his-tory of the whirlpool canals on Mars, arrived on Titan full of optimism and enthusiasm. Twenty months later, he was taken from Titan to a psycho-medical center on Earth, and ac-cording to the doctors there, completely irra-tional and suffering from man’s oldest dread: the unknown.

Returning to the underground center that had grown over the years near the machine, to house the living and working quarters of the tiny scientific and engineering community on Titan, was something like returning home for Lee. Someone had seen to it that he got his old quarters back again. Most of the people he had known from five years ago had gone elsewhere, but a few remained.

Lee spent his first few days renewing ac-quaintances and meeting the new men and women. He was surprised at their youth, until he tried to recall how he must have looked and acted when he first arrived on Titan.

“Makes you realize how time takes its toll, regardless of geriatrics,” he said to Dr. Kimball Bennett. Official director of the center, Ben-nett had called Lee into his office for a chat.

“Come on now,” Bennett scoffed, “you’re talking like a man of ninety. Why, you won’t need geriatrics for at least another month.”

They both laughed. Bennett was a shy-looking, slender astrophysicist who spoke soft-ly, never seemed to exert himself, and yet commanded the unabashed admiration of eve-ry member of the center.

“All right,” Lee said. “You didn’t call me to discuss my failing years. What’s on your mind?”

“Oh, I just thought it’s about time you got to work. You’ve been loafing around for a week now. We can’t afford to feed you freely forever, you know.”

“No, I guess you can’t,” Lee agreed, smiling.

Bennett leaned back in his chair and studied Lee for a long moment. “I won’t ask you why you wanted to come back. But I was delighted when I saw the paperwork with your name on it. Want to know why?”

“Now I am curious.”

“I want to leave Titan. I’ve been heading this operation for too long, now. I want out. And I really can’t leave until I have a top-notch man to run this little show. You’re my replacement.”

“As director?”

“Yes.”

“No,” Lee said, shaking his head. “I couldn’t.”

“Why not?”

“Why? Hell, Kimball, you saw them carry me out of here five years ago. How do you know the same thing won’t happen again? How do I know it?”

A trace of a smile flickered across Bennett’s face. “Look, the fact that you returned to Ti-tan—to this center and to that infernal ma-chine out there—well, that’s proof enough to me that you’ve conquered whatever it was that caused your breakdown.”

“Maybe you’re satisfied,” Lee countered, “but what about the rest of the staff? How will they feel about having a reconditioned neurotic heading the show?”

Bennett’s smile broke into an open grin. “Self-pity is a terrible thing. Do you know what those kids think of you? You’re Dr. Sidney Lee, humanity’s foremost chemical engineer. Who’s the man who deciphered the Martian whirl-pools that stumped the all geologists? Who re-synthesized the coronal polymer on Vesta? Who has the Lee protein fold named after him? Your troubles here on Titan were just a six-month incident in the middle of a dazzling ca-reer. Haven’t you noticed the deference with which they’ve been treating you?”

“I don’t know…” said Lee, humoring Ben-nett.

“It won’t be a lifetime job,” Bennett said. “In a couple of years, you can appoint a new young gun around here to run the show. Then you can go on to something else.”

Lee got up from his chair and paced slowly to the bookshelf that lined one wall of the office. “Why don’t you stay on for another year or so, and then turn it over to Elaine?”