Xeelee: Endurance Read Online Free PDF Page A

point,’ Poole said testily, as if I had challenged his manhood. ‘We’re here under the noses of your curators’ sensors, Emry. The less of a splash we make the better.’
    Miriam Berg said, ‘I designed this part of the mission profile. We’re going to float around at this altitude, about eight kilometres up – well above any problems with the topography, but under most of the cloud decks. We ought to be able to gather the science data we need from here. A couple of weeks should be sufficient.’
    ‘A couple of weeks in this coffin!’
    Poole thumped the walls of the gondola. ‘This thing expands. You’ll be able to get out of your suit. It’s not going to be luxury, Emry, but you’ll be comfortable enough.’
    Miriam said, ‘When the time comes we’ll climb back up to space from this altitude. The Crab doesn’t carry an orbit-to-surface flitter, but Harry will send down a booster unit to rendezvous with us and lift the gondola to orbit.’
    I stared at her. ‘You’re saying we don’t carry the means of getting off this moon?’
    Miriam said evenly, ‘Mass issues. We need to stay under the curacy sensors’ awareness threshold. Plus we’re supposed to look like an unmanned probe, remember. Look, it’s not a problem.’
    ‘Umm.’ Call me a coward, many have. But I didn’t like the idea that my only way off this wretched moon was thousands of kilometres away, and my access to it depended on a complicated series of rendezvous and coupling manoeuvres. ‘So what’s keeping us aloft? Hydrogen, helium?’
    Poole pointed at that inlet pipe. ‘Neither. This is a hot-air balloon, Emry, a Montgolfier.’ And he gave me a lecture on how hot-air technology is optimal if you must go ballooning on Titan. You have the buoyancy of the thick air, and the gravity is weak, and at such low temperatures you get a large expansion of your heated gas in response to a comparatively small amount of energy. Add all these factors into the kind of trade-off equation men like Poole enjoy so much, and out pops hot-air ballooning as the low-energy transport of choice on Titan.
    Miriam said, ‘We’re a balloon, not a dirigible; we can’t steer. But for a mission like this it’s enough for us to go pretty much where the wind takes us; all we’re doing is sampling a global ecosphere. And we can choose our course to some extent. The prevailing winds on Titan are easterly, but below about two kilometres there’s a strong westerly component. That’s actually a tide, raised by Saturn in the thick air down there. So we can select which way we get blown, just by ascending and descending.’
    ‘More stealth, I suppose. No need for engines.’
    ‘That’s the idea. We’ve arrived in the local morning. Titan’s day is fifteen Earth days long, and we can achieve a lot before nightfall – in fact I’m intending that we should chase the daylight. Right now we’re heading for the south pole, where it’s summer.’ And at the summer pole, as even I knew, methane and ethane pooled in open lakes – the only stable bodies of surface liquid in the System, aside from those on Earth and Triton.
    Poole grinned. ‘Summer on Titan. And we’re riding the oldest flying machine of all!’ Evidently he was starting to enjoy himself.
    Miriam smiled back, and their gloved hands locked together.
    The envelope snapped and billowed above us as the warm air filled it up.

 
    6
    So we drifted over Titan’s frozen landscape, heading for the south pole. For now Michael Poole kept us stuck in that unexpanded hull, and indeed inside our suits, though we removed our helmets, while the crew put the gondola through a fresh series of post-entry checks. I had nothing to do but stare out through the transparent walls at the very Earthlike clouds that littered the murky sky, or over my shoulder at the landscape that unfolded beneath me.
    Now that we were low enough to make out detail, I saw that those darker areas were extensive stretches of dunes, lined up