Chapter No.4.

After a good night's sleep, the crew was prepared to begin acclimating to the vessel they were trapped in. A breakfast of muffins and coffee helped, but just barely.

"So, what are we going to do while we're stuck in this big slug?" Janet asked.

"We have two very important tasks," Carl said. "Most important is for us to remain fit. We can do that by running around the deck and using the exercising equipment that's provided. The other task is just as important. We must maintain the ship."

"How?" she asked. "We're not engineers."

"That's true, but we can make repairs. The robots on the agricultural deck require periodic maintenance. We also need to keep the main systems on this vessel in top shape." He pointed to Alice. "You can use this ship's telescope to study Titan. We need to understand what we're facing when we get there."

"I'm not sure that I can get all that much data at this distance," Alice said.

"Perhaps, but I'm not convinced that this object that's near Titan is attempting to terraform it. I'm not sure that the oxygen is coming from it. For one thing, it would require a large tank of oxygen to cause Titan's atmosphere to change."

"The atmosphere did change," she pointed out. "How else could it happen?"

"That's a good question. Maybe you can determine that by careful observations."

She nodded.

"What else could it be doing?" Margaret asked.

"I don't know, but I get this bad gut feeling that this is related to the Chandra prophecy."

"Are you suggesting that they got tired of trying to change Earth and decided to do it to Titan?" Janet asked.

"That's a possibility, but we need evidence to verify what's going on."

A period of silence was broken by Alice, who decided to bring up a complaint. "It looks as if they decided that we didn't need much in the way of clothing on this voyage. All I've found is shorts and tees along with athletic shoes. I guess they decided that we women didn't need bras or sleepwear for that matter."

"Maybe they decided that saving money was more important than our modesty," Margaret said.

"What modesty!" Janet exclaimed. "We're living in the equivalent of a glass menagerie."

Alice looked around as if she were on edge. "Do they have surveillance cameras?"

"There are cameras, but they're to sense fires or other damage, not spy on us," Carl said. "They're not sending anything back to Mission Control. It would consume too much power for that. We're only required to keep them up to date on our situation each day, but that only requires a few minutes."

"I see that they have ten bunks on this thing," Janet said. "Why didn't they include other specialists in this ship of fools?"

"I believe that they didn't want to risk that many people on a maiden voyage," Carl replied. "In a way, we're better off with only four. We'll consume less essentials and reduce the possibilities of personal problems."

"I think that they consider us women as being expendable," Janet said. "We're nothing but Guinea pigs."

Carl didn't want to go there. It was the epitome of the gender discrimination discussion.

"When we arrive at Titan, are we going to attempt to go down to its surface?" Alice asked.

"Only you can decide that. Although, I think we must if we're ever going to understand what's going on there."

She replied with a brief smile.

"I thought Titan is really cold, like more than two hundred degrees below zero," Janet Margaret said.

"That's true, but we have suits to handle that. One thing we don't have to be concerned with is the atmospheric pressure. Titan's is nearly one and a half times Earth's."

"Assuming that the terraforming hasn't changed it," Margaret said.

"Yes, but I can't imagine it being changed all that much. It would take a lot of energy and materials to appreciably change an atmosphere that large."

"No use speculating," Alice said. "We'll determine it when we get there."

That ended he discussion. Carl realized that speculation about their destination was futile. They had to deal with their present situation. Traveling through deep space is fraught with many dangers, dangers that could be life threating. But be that as it may, Carl's immediate problem was living with three unhappy women on a spacecraft with limited elbow room. He realized that women's wrath was much more dangerous than the possible dangers of space.

Carl decided to take Janet down to the agricultural deck, which was four times the size of the quarters deck they were living on. Getting down there required climbing up an imbedded ladder on the aft wall, entering a portal to a tube that descended to the lower deck where there was a portal on the forward wall of the agricultural deck. When they exited it, they had to carefully climb down an embedded ladder while experiencing the increasing force of artificial gravity.

"Wow!" Janet exclaimed as she looked over a variety of plants. "You weren't kidding. This is a farm." She looked up at the blazing light from a lamp that was on the tip of a long pipe that led from the aft wall. "Is that the artificial sun?"

"Yes. It's a quartz Xenon arc lamp that simulates sunlight. This deck is fitted with a simulated rain system. Both are required to grow food stock."

"I see corn stocks and what looks like wheat," Janet said. "What else do they grow down here?"

"Vegetables, potatoes, the usual farm crops. They also cultivate coffee and hops."

"Hops!"

"Yeah, that's for the beer."

"Who came up with this idea, Budweiser?"

Carl laughed. "Come," he gestured. We need to go to the robot storage shelter."

Janet followed Carl through an opening through the corn field. They arrived at a rectangular cement slab that was shielded with a metal awning. This protected location had tools and parts to repair robots. There were two of the farming robots there obviously in need of repair.

The robots consisted of tubular bodies with tubular arms and legs. Their legs had flat plate feet and their arms were fitted with hands that had manipulatable fingers and thumbs. Their ball-shaped heads had bulging lenses that constituted eyes. They weren't designed for the job of farming and nothing more, or at least that's what it seemed.

"Ok," Carl said as he opened a cabinet and removed a handheld device. "This is a fault locator. You open the robot's front here," he said as he opened a covering over its chest. "Then, you plug the instrument into this connector and activate it." He pressed a button to make the instrument's screen light up with a circuit diagram, along with a picture of the circuit board. "See this blinking light," he said, pointing to the screen. "This shows you which part is at fault. In this case it's a motion sensor chip. All you have to do is use this chip extractor to remove the failed chip." He held up an object that looked like a clawed tool to clip around the chip before extracting it. He then inserted a replacement chip before pressing a button to revive the robot. The fault locator screen indicated that the chip was functioning. After he closed the access panel, the robot chirped and then walked away.

"Why are you showing me this?" Janet asked.

Carl took a long breath. "If something happens to me, it's imperative that you keep these robots functioning. It's going to take months to get to Titan and just as long to get back to Earth. We have enough food to last maybe three or four months, but after that this agricultural deck is all that keeps us from starvation."

She stared at him for a few minutes before replying. "Okay, I see why they created this deck. Hopefully, you'll survive. I don't think that I want to be an engineer."

Carl went over to the second robot and opened its chest panel. He used the fault locator device to find the problem, a servo motor that had fried. Replacing it required removing bolts and screws and then replacing the failed motor and securing it.

Janet watched him perform the repair, but she hoped that she would never have to do it herself.

When they arrived back at the quarters deck, Margaret and Alice were at the kitchen area drinking coffee.

"Where did you two go off to?" Margaret asked. "Is there a secret love shack on this slug?"

"We went down to the agricultural deck," Janet said. "He wanted to show me how to repair broken farm robots."

"A likely story!" she said in a teasing tone of voice.

"I'm studying to be an engineer," Janet said with a teasing smirk.

"Why did robots need repairs so soon?" Margaret asked. "We've only been out here for a few days."

"The robots have been on this vessel orbiting Earth for months," Carl said. "They had to get the crops planted and nurtured before we departed."

"Why do we need an agricultural deck?" Margaret asked. "We have plenty of food."

"That's true, but it's going to take months to get to Titan and just as long to come back to Earth. We need what the robots are harvesting to go that long."

"Why does it take so long?" she asked. "I though this new spaceship was able to accelerate to amazing speed!"

"As you know, there's no way to go to a planet in the solar system on a straight-line course. You have to deal with the fact that planets are moving around the Sun at many thousands of miles per hour and the Sun has a massive gravity that acts on everything. As it turns out, we'll have to do another burn to keep us on course. It'll help, but it will still take months to get to Titan."

"I hate this!" Margaret complained. "We're stuck on this big slug for months with not much to do other than exercise. It's equivalent to a prison sentence."

"They did provide some diversions," Carl said. "There's a section of the agricultural deck that we can use to play tennis and, believe it or not, there's a swimming pool down there."

Margaret frowned. "Why would they waste money to install a swimming pool on a spaceship?"

"It's a storage tank for watering the crops."

"Wonderful. They didn't add swimsuits to our meager wardrobe allotment."

"So, what's the big deal," Janet said. "We don't use swimsuits at his pool," she gestured to Carl.

"That's our rental compensation to him," Margaret said with an ornery grin

They laughed.

Carl realized that they were just teasing him and that they knew much more than they were admitting, but he elected to remain quiet. He had to live with them in a compromising situation for many months where boredom and despair could lead to mental problems. It was an awkward situation, one that he didn't want to get out of hand.

The ship is based on the one in 2001, A Space Odyssey. The farming robots are based on the movie Silent Running,