Analog SFF, June 2011 by Dell Magazine Authors Read Free Book Online Page A

stay in bed, the bare ankles and wrists would hardly matter.
    Heading off an “I'm thirsty” stall, she topped off the orange juice in the glass on his nightstand while he dawdled in the bathroom.
    With a struggle, she got him into bed. “Tuck me in?” he asked.
    "Sure, pumpkin."
    Simon made a face. He was nine , too old and rough-and-tough to be anyone's pumpkin.
    Not so. She half tucked, half tickled until he giggled. “Now stay in bed,” she ordered.
    She returned to the kitchen. Elbows on the table, chin in her hands, glower reemerging, she resumed her staring contest with the slowly turning globe.
    Saturn's largest moon: Titan.
    This was not how any human would—or could—behold Titan, its dense atmosphere all but opaque to visible light. Only radio-frequency waves pierced the perpetual shroud to reveal the tumultuous surface of one of the most interesting—and, in some ways, most Earthlike—bodies in the solar system.
    The holo orb was all swathes, indeed layers of swathes, like a world made of papier-maché. Each strip was a separate radar study, some undertaken from Earth, others from fly-bys years earlier by the late, lamented Cassini probe. Swathes varied in color, a distinct hue assigned to represent each radar wavelength. Dark and light shades showed what polarization had been used, the choice optimized for sensing smooth or rough features.
    Despite appearances, the mosaic was not constructed from photographs, because radar did not “see” as a camera would. Behind the imagery lay complicated mathematics, embodied in even messier software, that reconstructed topographic features from Doppler shifts, the slightest differences in round-trip signal delays, and echo strengths. (Not that the echoes were strong: At their closest, Earth and Saturn were about eight hundred million miles apart.) Fortunately she had reached the stage in her career when grad students handled the programming scut work.
    All those swathes and the riot of colors would have suggested to most people that Titan had been well mapped. Not so. Valerie was no casual observer, and her eyes went straight to the problem areas, mostly adjacent swathes that failed to align. Oh, nearby swathes might appear to match, were meant to overlap, but that could not just be assumed. Scanning a particular bit of Titan from across the solar system was tricky.
    Stuck home for the day, if not the rest of the week, eyeballing strips for common features was something she could do. And deucedly difficult.
    Titan was a dynamic place, its surface sculpted by erosion and weather, its methane lakes ever shrinking and expanding, its orbit tweaked and tugged in a complex dance by sixty-plus lesser moons, the entire world tidally flexed by Saturn's immense gravity. Software tried, with mixed success, to align radar images. Human eyes were still the best at matching multiple views of a canyon or lakeshore or hill captured at different resolutions, at different times, from different angles. Nor did the hills always stay put between radar studies. Dunes hundreds of feet tall and hundreds of miles long—dunes not of sand, but of exotic hydrocarbons (looking, the one time a probe had landed to look, like wet coffee grounds—drifted with the seasons. The marvel was that Valerie and her grad students had stitched together even this poor semblance of a topo map.
    Here and there, maddeningly, areas remained pitch black. Not yet scanned. Titan Incognita.
    Water bottle in hand, she stared at the tan layer—what there was of it. The latest survey had produced hardly any data. No data she might have chalked up to bad aim, but the bit that had come in confirmed proper aiming, and diagnostics confirmed correct operation of the receiver.
    So what had happened? A software glitch that somehow discarded the radar echoes? Always possible, but she had seen nothing indicative of mishandled data. Radio interference that perfectly canceled the signal but did not reveal itself? Very