Friday, January 14, 2005, 5:56pm
Friday, January 14, 2005, 5:56pm
It is not quite evening on this historic day. Huygens (pronounced HOY-gins) indeed survived its fiery entry into the thick atmosphere of Titan and drifted on parachutes for about two hours collecting chemistry and other properties of this very distant world until surviving landfall onto an icy and somewhat familiarly slushy surface.
The first image I downloaded looks like overcooked cauliflower. The second image I saw, from the surface itself, shows what appears to be a jumble of water ice rocks, though it might be ice of some other sort. On the horizon, instead of the dessert feeling of Mars or the blackness of our own airless Moon I see a haze filtering into a fog-like nothingness long before the land itself defines an actual horizon. Although frozen into an unthinkable cold, Titan is still one of the most terrestrial places in the solar system complete with mists of photochemical smog.
Beyond the orbit of Mars the solar system is an intensely cold place, colder than the coldest night on Earth, less hospitable than the darkest ocean trench or the most ghastly arctic desert or Antarctic mountaintop. On Earth the most extreme cold is nothing short of the Garden of Eden when compared to the balmiest days on Titan.
Half way up the eastern coast of North America, the 6:05pm Boston to Worcester express train is well beyond the city limits of our departure. The train completes a track change. We are picking up speed once more.
As I type on these keys, the train winds through the Pike underpass at nearly full speed. Now I can plainly see the heads and tails of traffic on the Pike. To my left I hear a bit of human chatter filtering from the very end of the train in the space where the stairs lead up from the lower deck to converge with those stairs leading down from overhead.
The train must be short one conductor tonight because only now after nearly 20 minutes are tickets being ‘collected’ in this carriage. In another ten minutes passengers will be forming the familiar line ahead of West Natick Station. Once this happens, ticket collecting would hardly be very tactful from those unfortunate enough ride farther into the night.
I suppose tact has little to do with the running of a railroad. Traditions and laws and work rules and the shear weight of institutional inertia govern the running of the trains more often than reason or humanity, though at times the conductors supply their own discretion when it makes sense to them.
Aboard a moving train the conductors have been the ruling authority for nearly two centuries, and to this very day what they decide is what will stand at least until the next station stop.
