Titanian adj.

Day after day the brilliant sphere flew toward distant Saturn, with the wreckage of the Forlorn Hope in tow. Piece by piece that wreckage was brought together and held in place by the Titanian tractors; and slowly but steadily, under Stevens’ terrific welding projector, the stubborn steel flowed together, once more to become a seamless, spaceworthy structure.

He wanted to kiss her—an impossibility, of course, in a Titanian night. It would have been a kiss of death; they would have died with lips frozen each to the others. He put away the thought that maybe that might be the pleasanter way, since death was inevitable now, anyway. Better, he decided, to die fighting.

After a stop at the Titanian docks for fuel and replacements of their emptied oxygen tanks, the ETBI-14 and its Ranger convoy lumbered for wayward lapetus.

[on Titania] They learned sooner than they dared expect. Whatever else might lay in store for them, they were at least spared the agony of waiting. The Titanian preparations took but little time. Within scant hours after their incarceration, the three Earthmen were once again dragged from their prison to meet their judgment and their fate.

The ring was ruined, and could never be worn again. As for the mold—well, it was ruined too, but a microscopic plant capable of smashing a subatomic heat lamp at twelve feet was certainly no slouch in the power field. A Titanian microvolt mold, Carstairs had called it. Its enemies were shambling perambulating plants, with anteater-like mouth parts—plants that looked like traveling cranes.

At first sight, the similarities between the Titanian people and ourselves are more noticeable than the differences; we impress what we expect to see on what we do see. Take the pretty little ‘mouth’ for example—how was I to know that it was an organ for breathing solely?

I could run the distance in the low gravity all right, but could I run a straight line? That was the question. My air-supply was ample and my suit heat-coils were satisfactory, but ten miles in a Titanian storm is infinity.

‘It never occurred to them that you’d cheat.’ ‘They cheated first. They changed the value of the card!’ ‘To them, that’s legitimate, a basic move in The Game. It’s a favorite play by the Titanian Game-players to exert their extra-sensory faculties on the card; it’s supposed to be a contest between the sides; the one who’s drawn the card struggles to keep its value constant, you see?’

Real spacers sometimes underestimated Titan, with disastrous results. It seemed altogether too easy to move around on a world where a pressure suit was unnecessary and the whole body could be exposed to the surrounding atmosphere. Nor was there any need to worry about freezing, even in the Titanian night. As long as the thermosuit retained its integrity, the body’s own hundred and fifty watts of heat could maintain a comfortable temperature indefinitely. These facts could induce a sense of false security [...] Ammonia poisoning is not the nicest way to die.

We also knew that on one tiny moonlet, hardly more than a large ring-particle, was an isolated colony of Uranus’ moon Titania, one of the diminishing vestiges of the Titanian Empire that had once spanned portions of the entire Solar System.

The suits, like the station, contained pure oxygen at one fifth of a standard atmosphere, an eighth of the Titanian surface pressure. A flood of ninety-Kelvin nitrogen must have washed into the victim’s face; it was unlikely that he felt much, if anything. Certainly he had made no sound.

Every day it was our responsibility to carefully screen and either pass through or reject travelers from all comers of the known Universe. Creatures such as green-speckled and lavender-hued Altairians, striped Melnusian miners, porcine Poldrogs, falcon-worshipping Rigelians, Archiporteyx spiritbearers, Titanian slitherers, Aldebarian musicians with their long trilling snouts, and of course the variegate new breeds from planets only recently swept by Federation troops and pronounced benign by Federation exobiologists.