Imperial Earth

Duncan was doing some mental arithmetic, and finding the results very depressing. Earth gravity was five times Titan’s-yet this diabolical device would merely double his local weight.

“It’s impossible,” he said gloomily. “I’ll never be able to walk on Earth.”

“Well, I did-though it wasn’t easy at first. Do everything that the doctors tell you, even if it sounds silly. Spend all the time you can in baths, or lying down. Don’t be ashamed to use wheelchairs or prosthetic devices, at least for the first couple of weeks. And never try to run.”

“RUWIR

“Sooner or later you’ll forget you’re on Earth, and then you7U break a leg.

Like to bet on it?”

Betting was one of the useful Makenzie vices. The money stayed in the family, and the loser always learned some valuable lesson. Though Duncan found it impossible to imagine five gravities, it could not be denied that

Colin had spent a year on Earth and had survived to tell the tale. So this was not a bet that promised favorable odds.

Now he was beginning to believe Colin’s prediction, and he scarcely noticed the extra mass-at least when he was moving in a straight line. It was only when he tried to change direction that he felt himself in the grip of some irresistible force. Not counting visitors from Earth, he was probably now the strongest man on Titan. It was not that his body was developing new strength; rather, it was recovering latent powers which had been slumbering, waiting for the moment when they would be called forth. In a few more years, what he was now attempting would be too late.

The four-meter-wide tunnel had been lasered, years ago, through the rim of the small crater which surrounded Oasis. Originally, it had been a pipeline for the ammoniated petrochemicals of the aptly named Loch

Hellbrew, one of the region’s chief That25 ural resources. Most of the lake had gone to feed the industries of Titan; later, the tapping of the moon’s internal heat, as part of the local planetary engineering project, had caused the remainder to evaporate.

There had been a certain amount of quiet grumbling when Ellen Makenzie had made her intentions clear, but the Department of Resources had pumped the remaining hydrogen-methane fog out of the tunnel, and now carried its oxygen, to the annual annoyance of the auditors, on inventory as part of the city’s air reserve. There were two manually operated bulkheads, as well as the city’s own backup seals. Anyone went beyond the second bulkhead at his own risk, but that was negligible. The tunnel was through solid rock, and since the pressure inside was higher than ambient, there was no danger of Titanian poisons leaking inward.

Half a dozen side tunnels, all of them now blocked, led out of the main passageway. When he had first come here as a small boy, Duncan had filled those sealed-off shafts with wonder and magic. Now he knew that they merely led to long-abandoned surge chambers. Yet though all the mystery was gone, it still seemed to him that these corridors were haunted by two ghosts. One was a little girl who had been known and loved by only a handful of pioneers; the other was a giant who had been mourned by millions.

There had been endless jokes about Robert Kleinman’s name, for he was almost two meters tall, and porportioned accordingly. And his talents had matched his physique; he had been a master pilot at the age of thirty, despite the difficulty of fitting him into standard space equipment. Duncan had never considered him particularly good-looking, but in this matter he was outvoted by a small army of women including Ellen Makenzie.

Grandma had met Captain Kleinman only a year after the final parting with

Malcolm; she may have been on an emotional rebound, but he certainly was not. Yet thereafter the Captain had never looked at another woman, and it had become one of those love affairs famous on many worlds. It had lasted throughout the planning and preparations for the first

expedition to Saturn and the fitting-out of the Challenger in orbit off Titan.

And as far as Ellen Makenzie was concerned it had never died; it was frozen forever at the moment when the ship met its mysterious and still inexplicable doom, deep in the jet streams of the South Temperate Zone.

Moving rather more slowly than when he had started his walk, Duncan came to the final bulkhead. On Grandma’s hundredth birthday, the younger members of the family had painted it in brilliant fluorescent colors, which had faded not at all in the last dozen years. Since Ellen had never referred to it, and never heard questions which she did not wish to answer, there was no way of discovering if she appreciated the gift.