Encounter

Abstract

The dawn struggled to claw its way through the orange gloom, with little success. Even on the brightest of Titan’s days, dawn hung on tenaciously until mid-morning. Sometimes you could see a faint glow from Saturn, beyond the mist and always amorphous. But not today. Not in this soup. It was all so ironic. It had only been a few years since Kevin Nordsmitt had taken the job in San Diego to get away from those lousy Washington, D. C., winters with all that ice. Now he was living on an ice ball. And cold? The nation’s capital had nothin’ to compare. Just my luck, ending up in a place like this, he thought, as the sweat trickled from his forehead into his left eye.