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said. “But when we do,
I’ll
pick out the modem.”

Slow Life
    It was the Second Age of Space. Gagarin, Shepard, Glenn, and Armstrong were all dead. It was
our
turn to make history now.
    —
The Memoirs of Lizzie O’Brien
    THE RAINDROP began forming ninety kilometers above the surface of Titan. It started with an infinitesimal speck of tholin, adrift in the cold nitrogen atmosphere. Dianoacetylene condensed on the seed nucleus, molecule by molecule, until it was one shard of ice in a cloud of billions.
    Now the journey could begin.
    It took almost a year for the shard of ice in question to precipitate downward twenty-five kilometers, where the temperature dropped low enough that ethane began to condense on it. But when it did, growth was rapid.
    Down it drifted.
    At forty kilometers, it was for a time caught up in an ethane cloud. There it continued to grow. Occasionally it collided with another droplet and doubled in size. Until finally it was too large to be held effortlessly aloft by the gentle stratospheric winds.
    It fell.
    Falling, it swept up methane and quickly grew large enough to achieve a terminal velocity of almost two meters per second.
    At twenty-seven kilometers, it passed through a dense layer of methane clouds. It acquired more methane, and continued its downward flight.
    As the air thickened, its velocity slowed and it began to lose some of its substance to evaporation. At two and half kilometers, when it emerged from the last patchy clouds, it was losing mass so rapidly it could not normally be expected to reach the ground.
    It was, however, falling toward the equatorial highlands, where mountains of ice rose a towering five hundred meters into the atmosphere. At two meters and a lazy new terminal velocity of one meter per second, it was only a breath away from hitting the surface.
    Two hands swooped an open plastic collecting bag upward, and snared the raindrop.
    “Gotcha!” Lizzie O’Brien cried gleefully.
    She zip-locked the bag shut, held it up so her helmet cam could read the barcode in the corner, and said, “One raindrop.” Then she popped it into her collecting box.
    Sometimes it’s the little things that make you happiest. Somebody would spend a
year
studying this one little raindrop when Lizzie got it home. And it was just Bag 64 in Collecting Case 5. She was going to be on the surface of Titan long enough to scoop up the raw material of a revolution in planetary science. The thought of it filled her with joy.
    Lizzie dogged down the lid of the collecting box and began to skip across the granite-hard ice, splashing the puddles and dragging the boot of her atmosphere suit through the rivulets of methane pouring down the mountainside. “
I’m singing in the rain.
” She threw out her arms and spun around. “
Just singing in the rain!
”
    “Uh…O’Brien?” Alan Greene said from the
Clement
. “Are you all right?”
    “
Dum-dee-dum-dee-dee-dum-dum, I’m…something again.
”
    “Oh, leave her alone.” Consuelo Hong said with sour good humor. She was down on the plains, where the methane simply boiled into the air, and the ground was covered with thick, gooey tholin. It was, she had told them, like wading ankle-deep in molasses. “Can’t you recognize the scientific method when you hear it?”
    “If you say so,” Alan said dubiously. He was stuck in the
Clement
, overseeing the expedition and minding the website. It was a comfortable gig —
he
wouldn’t be sleeping in his suit
or
surviving on recycled water and energy stix — and he didn’t think the others knew how much he hated it.
    “What’s next on the schedule?” Lizzie asked.
    “Um…Well, there’s still the robot turbot to be released. How’s that going, Hong?”
    “Making good time. I oughta reach the sea in a couple of hours.”
    “Okay, then it’s time O’Brien rejoined you at the lander. O’Brien, start spreading out the balloon and going over the harness checklist.”
    “Roger that.”
    “And