Statesman by Piers Anthony Page B

under five thousand kilometers; Titan just over.
    Their densities and masses were similarly close. They could have been sister planets, as far as I was concerned.
    But there were differences. The surface temperature of Titan was fifty degrees Kelvin colder than that of Callisto, and while Callisto was airless, Titan had a substantial atmosphere; its solid surface was completely hidden from exterior view. Critics refer to that atmosphere as solid smog; the natives refer to it as the basic stuff of the origin of life. Certainly it represents a rich chemical environment from which the natives process many products, and its pressure of one bar (the same as Earth's) facilitates the operation of city-domes in the surface. It is the only planet besides Earth itself whose atmosphere is dominated by nitrogen.
    Politically, it was another matter. Titan was colonized by the Japanese of Earth, and they maintained their rivalry and often enmity with huge Saturn. Because Titan's position in space is far superior for the direct launching of ships, Titan's Navy became more formidable than Saturn's. It was, as Khukov remarked, Jupiter, not Saturn, that took on that Navy during the Second System War, and reduced it to impotence, and occupied Titan itself. Thereafter, Titan was forbidden to manufacture arms, including fighting ships.
    Instead, she had turned her energies to commerce—and shortly became a System leader in the construction of merchant ships, and in computerized technology. It was a metamorphosis that perhaps the nominal winners of SWII had not anticipated. Titan had beaten its swords into plowshares, and was now stronger as an economic power than it had been as a military power. Jupiter itself imported so much from Titan that it had a sizable trade deficit with that planet. That is, Titan was making a lot more money than Jupiter was. Yet Jupiter was still committed by treaty to undertake the military defense of Titan. Today Titan was happy with the arrangement, but Jupiter was chafing somewhat. It was a nice irony.
    Irony: which brings my thought to iron. There was Titan's problem. It had been able to mine its own iron, but its industrial base had expanded far beyond its natural resources, and it now required far more iron than it mined. Iron was of course the metal of power for the System, because it could be handled magnetically. Processed into contra-terrene iron, or CTI, it was the fuel for all major ships and all major cities and all industrial complexes. So the irony of Titan was that this source of natural iron was hungriest of all for imported iron.
    This was a hunger I proposed to address on this mission.
    Our party was transferred in space to a Titan—excuse me, Rising Sun—merchant vessel and conveyed to the surface of the planet. This was an interesting experience in its own right. The atmosphere was deep, and developed a brownish hue as we descended. It was not stormy, as I had half feared, but very thick; soon it obscured anything that might have been any distance. I began to feel claustrophobic, until I reminded myself that one bar was the pressure limit; there was no way that our ship would implode! Not when the internal pressure matched the external pressure.
    We landed; the fractional gee, about one-sixth Earth-norm, made this feasible here. I had been so long in the atmospheres of the giants that I had lost the feel for “hard” landings. A car-bubble limousine carried us toward Kyo, the capital. This ride, too, was fascinating; Sprit and Tasha seemed as interested as I was, though Forta took it in stride. Perhaps the environment reminded her of that of Mercury. Smilo, who had submitted to the indignity of a cage for this part of the journey, snoozed.
    We cruised along a highway that curved around mountains of methane ice, and beside ponds of liquid methane from which methane vapor ascended slowly back into the dark sky. Brown methane snowflakes drifted down to coat every solid surface. This just happened