Best of Breed

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Tuesday morning, July 27, 2047, should have been the beginning of the most triumphant period of Royce Hunter’s life. And—for almost forty-four hours—it was. In the forty-fourth hour the nightmare began.

It started with a minor blip on the Titan Explorer’s radar screen. Six days earlier the Explorer III had passed the invisible halfway point between the orbits of Jupiter and Saturn and was now within a hundred million miles of its goal, a landing on Saturn’s largest moon. Earth was more than eight astronomical units away, nearly three-quarters of a billion miles.

More relevantly, with the Asteroid Belt and its millions of fragments of nickel-iron rock also five AUs behind the ship, it was almost inconceivable that a wandering body could be this near the Explorer. The object on the screen was a mere .0019 AUs away, something less than the distance from Earth to the Moon.

The ship’s AI control program pondered the situation, noted that its two human directors were still deep in REM sleep, and decided to do nothing more for the moment.

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