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unbuckling. ‘We need to make an external inspection. Figure out our options.’
    Miriam followed suit, and laughed. She said to me, ‘Romantic, isn’t he? The first human footfalls on Titan, and he calls it an external inspection.’ Suddenly she was friendly. The crash had evidently made her feel we had bonded in some way.
    But Bill Dzik dug an elbow in my ribs hard enough to hurt through the layers of my suit. ‘Move, Emry.’
    ‘Leave me alone.’
    ‘We’re packed in here like spoons. It’s one out, all out.’
    Well, he was right; I had no choice.
    Poole made us go through checks of our exosuits, their power cells, the integrity of their seals. Then he drained the air and popped open the hatch in the roof before our faces. I saw a sky sombre and brown, dark by comparison with the brightness of our internal lights. Flecks of black snow drifted down. The hatch was a door from this womb of metal and ceramics out into the unknown.
    We climbed up through the hatch in reverse order from how we had come in: Poole, Dzik, myself, then Miriam. The gravity, a seventh of Earth’s, was close enough to the Moon’s to make that part of the experience familiar at least, and I moved my weight easily enough. Once outside the hull, lamps on my suit lit up in response to the dark.
    I dropped down a metre, and thus drifted to my first footfall on Titan.
    The sandy surface crunched under my feet. I knew the sand was water ice, grains hard as glass in the intense chill. The sand was ridged into ripples, as if by a receding tide, and pebbles lay scattered, worn and eroded. A wind buffeted me, slow and massive, and I heard a low bass moan. A black rain smeared my faceplate.
    The four of us stood together, chubby in our suits, the only humans on a world larger than Mercury. Beyond the puddle of light cast by our suit lamps an entirely unknown landscape stretched off into the infinite dark.
    Miriam Berg was watching me. ‘What are you thinking, Jovik?’ As far as I know these were the first words spoken by any human standing on Titan.
    ‘Why ask me?’
    ‘You’re the only one of us who’s looking at Titan and not at the gondola.’
    I grunted. ‘I’m thinking how like Earth this is. Like a beach somewhere, or a high desert, the sand, the pebbles. Like Mars, too, outside Kahra.’
    ‘Convergent processes,’ Dzik said dismissively. ‘But you are an entirely alien presence. Here, your blood is as hot as molten lava. Look, you’re leaking heat.’
    And, looking down, I saw wisps of vapour rising up from my booted feet.
    We checked over the gondola. Its inner pressure cage had been sturdy enough to protect us, but the external hull was crumpled and damaged, various attachments had been ripped off, and it had dug itself into the ice.
    Poole called us together for a council of war. ‘Here’s the deal. There’s no sign of the envelope; it was shredded, we lost it. The gondola’s essential systems are sound, most importantly the power. The hull’s taken a beating, though.’ He banged the metal wall with a gloved fist; in the dense air I heard a muffled thump. ‘We’ve lost the extensibility. I’m afraid we’re stuck in these suits.’
    ‘Until what?’ I said. ‘Until we get the spare balloon envelope inflated, right?’
    ‘We don’t carry a spare,’ Bill Dzik said, and he had the grace to sound embarrassed. ‘It was a cost-benefit analysis—’
    ‘Well, you got that wrong,’ I snapped back. ‘How are we supposed to get off this damn moon now? You said we had to make some crackpot rendezvous with a booster pack.’
    Poole tapped his chest, and a Virtual image of Harry’s head popped into existence in mid-air. ‘Good question. I’m working on options. I’m fabricating another envelope, and I’ll get it down to you. Once we have that gondola aloft again, I’ll have no trouble picking you up. In the meantime,’ he said more sternly, ‘you have work to do down there. Time is short.’
    ‘When we get back to the