Imperial Earth

Like the Earth, Titan has distinct seasons-though it is difficult to apply the word “summer” where the temperature at high noon seldom climbs to fifty below. And as Saturn takes almost thirty years to circle the sun, each of the Titanian seasons is more than seven Terran years in length.

The tiny sun, taking eight days to cross the sky, is seldom visible through the cloud cover, and there is very little temperature difference between day and night—or, for that matter, between Poles and Equator. Titan thus lacks climate; but it can, on occasion, produce its own quite spectacular brand of weather.

The most impressive meteorological phenomenon is the so-called Methane

Monsoon, which often though not invariably-occurs with the onset of spring in the northern hemisphere. During the long winter, some of the methane in the atmosphere condenses in local cold spots and forms shallow lakes, up to a thousand kilometers square but seldom more than a few meters deep, and often covered with fantastically shaped bergs and floes of ammonia ice.

However, it requires the exceedingly low temperature of minus a hundred and sixty to keep methane liquefied, and no part of Titan is ever that

cold for very long. A “warm” wind, or a break in the clouds-and the methane lakes will flash suddenly into vapor. It is as if, on Earth, one of the oceans were to evaporate, abruptly increasing its volume hundreds of times and so completely changing the state of the atmosphere. The result would be catastrophic, and on Titan it is sometimes scarcely less so. Wind speeds of up to five hundred kilometers an hour have been recorded -or to be accurate, estimated from their aftereflects. They last only for a few minutes; but that is quite long enough. Several of the early expeditions were annihilated by the monsoon, before it became possible to predict its onset.

Before the first landings on Titan, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, some optimistic exobiologists had hoped to find life around the relatively warm oases that were known to exist. This hope was slow to fade, and for a while it was revived by the discovery of the strange wax formations of the famous Crystal Caves. But by the end of the century, it was quite certain that no indigenous life forms had ever existed on Titan.

There had never been any expectation of finding life on the other moons, where conditions were far more hostile. Only. Iapetus and Rhea, less than half the size of Titan, had even a trace of atmosphere. The remaining satellites were barren aggregates of rock, overgrown snowballs, or mixtures of both. By the mid-2200’s, more than forty had been discovered, the majority of them less than a hundred kilometers in diameter. The outer ones-twenty million kilometers from Saturn-all. moved in retrograde orbits and were clearly temporary visitors from the asteriod belt; there was much argument as to whether they should be counted as genuine satellites at all.

Though some had been explored by geologists, many had never been examined, except by robot space probes, but there was no reason to suppose that they held any great surprises.

Perhaps one day, when Titan was prosperous and getting a little dull, future generations would take up the challenge of these tiny worlds. Some optimists had talked of turning the carbon-rich snowballs into

orbital zoos, basking beneath the warmth of their own fusion suns and teeming with strange life forms. Others had dreamed of private pleasure domes and low-gravity resorts, and islands in space for experiments in super-technology life styles. But these were fantasies of a Utopian future;

Titan needed all its energies now to solve its coming crisis, in this demi millennial year of 2276.

THE POLITICS OF TIME AND SPACE

Then only two Makenzies were talking together, their conversation was even more terse and telegraphic than when all three were present.

Intuition, parallel thought processes, and shared experience filled in gaps that would have made much of their discourse wholly unintelligible to outsiders.

“Handle?” asked Malcolra.

“We?!” retorted Colin.

“Thirty-one? Boy!”

Which might be translated into plain English as:

“Do you think he can handle the job?”

“Have you any doubts that we could?”

“At thirty-one? I’m not so sure. He’s only a boy.” “Anyway, we’ve no choice.

This is a Godsent or Washington-sent—opportunity that we can’t afford to miss. He’ll have to get a crash briefing on Terran affairs, learn all that’s necessary about the United States…”

“That reminds me-what is the United States these days? I’ve lost count.”

“Now there are forty-five states-Texas, New Mexico, Alaska, and Hawaii have rejoined the Union, at least for the Centennial year.”

“Just what does that mean, legally?”

“Not very much. They pretend to be autonomous, but pay their regional and global taxes like everyone else. It’s a typical

Terran compromise.”

Malcolm, remembering his origins, sometimes found it necessary to defend his native world against such cynical remarks.