Titan Read Online Free PDF

Road, and Surveyor Road, and Ranger Road. For the Jet Propulsion Laboratory had built and run spacecraft which had reached every planet in the Solar System, save only Pluto. And, right now, the scientists here were gathering information from the moons of Saturn.
    She parked her car. Isaac Rosenberg was there to meet her at the visitors’ reception. “Jackie. Thanks for coming in.”
    “Isaac, it’s good to meet you again.”
    He pushed his John Lennon spectacles a little further back up his nose. “Rosenberg. Everybody calls me Rosenberg.”
    “Rosenberg, then.”
    He was somewhere in his mid-twenties, she figured, maybe a couple of years older than she was. He didn’t look as if he lived too well; his face was pale and badly shaved, and his prematurely thinning black hair, none too clean, was tied back in a pony tail.
    But none of that mattered, compared to the look in his brown eyes.
    He said, “Thanks for coming out. Listen, you want me to get you a coffee? A doughnut, maybe?”
    “No, thanks, Rosenberg. I want you to tell me about your results. At the party the other night, you were so—”
    “Out of it.”
    “Were you serious? Are the press reports true? How come the official spokesmen won’t answer questions on it?”
    “Come see the results for yourself.”
    He led her through the reception area and across the campus, to a long, low building he called the SFOF, for Space Flight Operations Facility. He took her up to the second floor, to a big windowless loft of a room, painted gray, with gray carpeting. It was divided up into rows of cubicles, within which worked—Rosenberg said—the engineers and scientists who controlled Cassini’s systems. So this is a spacecraft control center, she thought. It was about as lively as a bank’s back office.
    They crossed the engineering room, and then passed through a hall to a science area, and entered a new warren of cubicles, the science back room. Rosenberg took her to his own cubicle, which was cluttered up with papers and rolled-up softscreens and an old-fashioned hard-key calculator. There were reproductions of the covers of antique science fiction magazines taped to the cubicle walls, she saw: By Spaceship to Saturn, and Raiders of Saturn’s Rings, and Missing Men of Saturn
    He showed her a Packard Bell softscreen, stuck to one wall, which was cycling through displays of what turned out to be a thermal profile through Titan’s atmosphere, as sampled by the descending Huygens lander. Grabbinga mouse, he cleared down the screen and pulled up data from a fresh database.
    She’d met him a few days before at a party at her old sorority at Caltech, where he was getting steadily drunk on ice beer and talking too much, loud and fast and humorlessly, about his work here at JPL on the Cassini/Huygens mission. He’d attracted a rotating audience of student types, some intrigued, some argumentative; as the group cycled, Rosenberg would happily launch into his obsessive monologue again, as far as Jackie could tell pretty much from the beginning.
    He was talking about biochemistry—the chemistry of life—on Saturn’s moon, Titan.
    Jackie was intrigued. Here was a classic loser magnet, but with a story of such compelling intensity that it was attracting a crowd, if a transient one. And she got even more interested, when the sensational claims about life on Titan had started appearing in the press and the net.
    She was in the middle of a new effort to revive her once-promising career in journalism, which had been pretty much dormant since her second kid was born. If she was going to progress, she knew, she was going to have to develop a nose for a story, her own story, something dramatic and compelling—but out of the way, far from the attention span of the big boys.
    And maybe—she’d thought, listening to this skinny monomaniac mouthing off to a bunch of strangers about weird chemistry results from Titan, and with his eves shining—maybe, she’d found