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Crab ,’ Bill Dzik said to Poole, ‘you hold him down and I’ll kill him.’
    ‘He’s my father,’ said Michael Poole. ‘ I’ll kill him.’
    Harry dissolved into a spray of pixels.
    Poole said, ‘Look, here’s the deal. We’ll need to travel if we’re to achieve our science goals; we can’t do it all from this south pole site. We do have some mobility. The gondola has wheels; it will work as a truck down here. But we’re going to have to dig the wreck out of the sand first, and modify it. And meanwhile Harry’s right about the limited time. I suggest that Bill and I get on with the engineering. Miriam, you take Emry and go see what science you can do at the lake. It’s only a couple of kilometres’ – he checked a wrist map patch and pointed – ‘that way.’
    ‘ OK .’ With low-gravity grace Miriam jumped back up to the hatch, and retrieved a pack from the gondola’s interior.
    I felt deeply reluctant to move away from the shelter of the wrecked gondola. ‘What about those birds?’
    Miriam jumped back down and approached me. ‘We’ve seen no sign of the birds since we landed. Come on, curator. It will take your mind off how scared you are.’ And she tramped away into the dark, away from the pool of light by the gondola.
    Poole and Dzik turned away from me. I had no choice but to follow her.

 
    8
    Walking any distance was surprisingly difficult.
    The layered heat-retaining suit was bulky and awkward, but it was flexible, and in that Titan was unlike the Moon with its vacuum, where the internal pressure forces even the best skinsuits to rigidity. But on Titan you are always aware of the resistance of the heavy air. At the surface the pressure is half as much again as on Earth, and the density of the air four times that at Earth’s surface. It is almost like moving underwater. And yet the gravity is so low that when you dig your feet into the sand for traction you have a tendency to go floating off the ground. Miriam showed me how to extend deep, sharp treads from the soles of my boots to dig into the loose sand.
    It is the thickness of the air that is the survival challenge on Titan; you are bathed in an intensely cold fluid, less than a hundred degrees above absolute zero, that conducts away your heat enthusiastically, and I was always aware of the silent company of my suit’s heating system, and the power cells that would sustain it for no more than a few hours.
    ‘Turn your suit lights off,’ Miriam said to me after a few hundred metres. ‘Save your power.’
    ‘I prefer not to walk into what I can’t see.’
    ‘Your eyes will adapt. And your faceplate has image enhancers set to the spectrum of ambient light here . . . Come on, Jovik. If you don’t I’ll do it for you; your glare is stopping me from seeing too.’
    ‘All right, damn it.’
    With the lights off, I was suspended in brown murk. But my eyes did adapt, and the faceplate subtly enhanced my vision. Titan opened up around me, a plain of sand and wind-eroded rock under an orange-brown sky – again not unlike Mars. Clouds of ethane or methane floated above me, and beyond them the haze towered up, layers of organic muck tens of kilometres deep. Yet I could see the sun in that haze, a spark low on the horizon, and facing it a half-full Saturn, much bigger than the Moon in Earth’s sky. Of the other moons or the stars, indeed of the Crab , I could see nothing. All the colours were drawn from a palette of crimson, orange and brown. Soon my eyes longed for a bit of green.
    When I looked back I could see no sign of the gondola, its lights already lost in the haze. I saw we had left a clear line of footsteps behind us. It made me quail to think that this was the only footstep trail on all this little world.
    We began to descend a shallow slope. I saw lines in the sand, like tide marks. ‘I think we’re coming to the lake.’
    ‘Yes,’ Miriam said. ‘It’s summer here, at the south pole. The lakes evaporate, and the ethane