Titan is a curious resident of the solar system. For that matter, Mason reflected, it was curious that it existed at all, and for that matter it was curious that Saturn existed at all, and the universe at all, and Mason at all. He found it a consolation to contemplate how small he was, in comparison to his surroundings. When had it been, that day he switched over from imagining the universe beginning with Earth and extending beyond? One day, he found that his point of view was no longer in Urbana, Illinois, and was now located in some undefined, implacable immensity where all the universe was a pinpoint of light, and in his imagination he approached it through the void until it broke down intimately into larger pinpoints, and then galaxies, suns, and planets, like in one of those YouTube sped-up videos. Closer and closer Mason would draw to it in his mind, until finally he was in Urbana, and Alma Mater was standing with arms outstretched.

Mason’s step had quickened, he noticed. In density, Titan was half ice, half rock. If only she had known this, Emily Dickinson would have written a poem about it. Since ice and rock tend, in their nature, to remain ice and rock, what interested Mason was an ocean of magma between the ice and the rock. This sort of sea was not frozen because it contained a great deal of ammonia. If anything was happening on Titan it was happening there, thought Mason, as he used his swipe card to pass security and take the elevator to the floor where his laboratory was located. Swipe cards were made possible because of early computer programs such as those at Illinois. At the time, the university’s computer department was contained entirely within a modest office building just east of what was now the Center, and was filled mostly with vacuum tubes. A photo of it was framed on the elevator wall.

“Same old, same old,” said Bruce Elliott, who was on duty. “Maybe an undertone of a slight variation of same old, same old. Then suddenly the shit hits the fan.” Having obviously prepared his punch line, Elliott turned up a knob and the room was filled with meaningless noise. Only his computers could notice that it wasn’t quite the same. That it was old was a given.

“Your good friend Regan has a theory,” he said, referring to a woman who now took off her headphones and wheeled her chair around to face them. Her jolly red glasses frames usually looked bookended by Bose.

“I have a theory,” Regan said, “but it’s impossible in practice.”

“All theories are,” Mason said, “until they’re proven to the satisfaction of every last fanatic who remains unsatisfied.”

“Well, to begin with, this sounds like a pattern. Highly unscientific, but I’ve been listening to this shit longer than you have. My theory,” Regan said, “is that we are receiving the signal from a slightly different point in the area than before.”

“We know that Cassini parachuted to the surface, which is definitely a place, and it stayed where it landed” Mason said. “Because how did it move?”

“That I don’t know,” Regan said. “It would tend to be impossible.” She giggled. Regan giggled a lot about imponderables. “I’ve run some analysis, and it’s clear from the machines that the class of noise we’re been receiving is subtly different.”

“How different?”

“Subtly different.”

“I see,” Mason.

“Science-fiction different,” Regan said.

“Tell us a story,” said Elliott.

“Let’s go over to the Capitol,” Regan said. “I know you’ve just come from there.”

Alex and Claire were still there. “Hiya, pards,” Alex said.

“Regan has a science-fiction story for us,” Mason said.

Claire continued to sort her shoeboxes. Alex nodded “beer” to the waitress.

“In an infinitesimal solar system in a speck of a galaxy,” Regan said, “the third rock from the sun is inhabited by intelligent beings. These creatures develop intelligence, and send a spacecraft to the moon of one of the other planets.”

“Are you racing through this?” said Alex.

“Now it gets good. This moon has a frozen surface. Beneath that surface is a magma of liquid—an ocean that encloses the moon. Apparently, the third-rock people speculate, this ocean is somewhat made of liquid water.”

“The spacecraft went for a sail,” Alex said.

“The spacecraft was not very heavy,” Regan said. “It happened to land at a place where the subsurface sea was slightly closer to the surface, or the surface was slightly depressed.”

“Captured by pirates,” said Elliott.

“I’m ignoring you,” Regan said, and giggled. “The way they later figure it out, over several decades the spacecraft settles into the surface just a tiny wee bit. Maybe its batteries generate enough heat to melt the surface slightly.”

“You don’t even know if it has batteries,” Alex said.

“Shut up. I don’t need to know. In this ocean, life has evolved. These magma oceans were warmer than the rest of the moon. They were made up of methane-ethane kinds of shit. We know on earth that life is possible without oxygen. Think of those plumes at the bottom of the Pacific, living off sulfur. Ugh! Oy, what a life.”

“I give you the plumes,” Alex said. He pushed aside his shoebox and settled into drink.

“In these vast oceans, over many, many years, life evolves. I don’t think it had very much else to do. It has lots longer than seven days and seven nights. It doesn’t form bodies and evolve into plants and animals. But as Darwin taught us, a random, accidental event could cause something to change in this life, whatever it was, no matter if it was only a molecule wandering lonely as a cloud. This something happened. Years pass. Two molecules get chummy and do something to react to the presence of each other.”

“They become Moby Dick,” Alex said.

“In your dreams,” Regan said. “Not enough organization. No physical material masses. All still molecules. Evolving, evolving, evolving, all the way down, like the turtles.”

“I like the turtles,” Mason said. “The American Indians said they stood for perseverance.”

“Name me a culture that doesn’t say that,” Alex said.

“O.K.,” Regan said, “here comes the Darwinian thunderbolt. The accident, the mutation, we don’t know what—but definitely something, because in the result is the proof.”

“An act of God,” said Alex, needling Regan. He knew Regan was a Unitarian and so would both reject God and keep an open mind on the subject.

“No need for God,” Regan said. “Just something. You have a change, you have a reason for a change. Not even a reason. Just the fact that first they’re this and then they’re this other thing that maybe happened by itself and maybe didn’t, but one way or another.”

The waitress knew them and stopped at their booth.

“One left of the apple crumb cake,” she said.

“Dibbies,” said Regan. “So anyway, we know the evolution of life involves the communication of information. Not information like the Unicops keep on potheads. Information like, here it is, and now it’s over there, and what do you know.”

“I’m with you,” Mason said.