by Ben Bova
“They’re trying to maintain social balance,” Grant argued. “There’s more than ten billion people on Earth now. We’ve got to have stability! We’ve got to control population growth. Otherwise we won’t be able to feed all those people, or educate them.”
“Educate them?” Karlstad’s thin eyebrows rose. “They’re not being educated. They’re being trained to obey.”
“I—” Grant saw the pain in the man’s pale eyes and clamped his mouth shut. No sense arguing with him about this. One of the first lessons his father had taught him was never to argue over religion. Or politics. And this was both.
Karlstad apparently felt the same way. He forced a smile and said, “So now you know my life story and I know yours.”
Grant conceded the point with a nod.
“Let’s get on with it.”
“Okay.”
Turning back to the desktop screen, Karlstad called out, “Computer, display work assignment for Archer, Grant A.”
Immediately the synthesized voice responded, “Grant A. Archer is assigned as assistant laboratory technician for the biology department.”
Grant jumped out of his chair. “Biology department? That can’t be right! I’m not a biologist!”
Karlstad waved him gently back into his seat “The details are on my screen, Grant. The assignment is correct.”
“But I’m not a biologist,” Grant repeated.
“I’m afraid that’s got nothing to do with it. The operative term is ‘assistant laboratory technician.’ It doesn’t matter which lab you’re assigned to; they just “Okay.”
Turning back to the desktop screen, Karlstad called out, “Computer, display work assignment for Archer, Grant A.”
Immediately the synthesized voice responded, “Grant A. Archer is assigned as assistant laboratory technician for the biology department.”
Grant jumped out of his chair. “Biology department? That can’t be right! I’m not a biologist!”
Karlstad waved him gently back into his seat “The details are on my screen, Grant. The assignment is correct.”
“But I’m not a biologist,” Grant repeated.
“I’m afraid that’s got nothing to do with it. The operative term is ‘assistant laboratory technician.’ It doesn’t matter which lab you’re assigned to; they just need a warm body to do the scutwork.”
“But—”
“You’re a grad student, brightboy. Slave labor. Cheaper than a robot and a lot easier to train.”
“But I don’t know anything about biology.”
“You don’t have to. You can push a broom and clean a fish tank; that’s what you’re needed for.”
“I’m an astrophysicist!”
Karlstad shook his head sadly. “Look, Grant, maybe someday you’ll be an astrophysicist. But right now you’re just a graduate student. Slave labor, just like the rest of us.”
“But how can I work toward my degree cleaning fish tanks?”
With a wry grin, Karlstad replied, “Why do you think nobody’s developed real robots? You know, a real mechanical man with a computer for a brain?”
“Too expensive?”
“That’s right. Too expensive—when compared to human labor. Grad students are cheap labor, Grant. I’ve always thought that if anybody does invent a practical robot, it’ll be a grad student who does it. They’re the only ones with the real motivation for it.”
“The biology department.” Grant groaned.
“Cheer up,” said Karlstad. “Biology department includes the aquarium. You’ll get to work with Lainie. Maybe she’ll show you how to do it like dolphins.”
SOLACE
Grant stumbled back to his quarters, stunned and hurt and angry. Assistant lab technician, he grumbled to himself. Slave labor. I might as well be in jail. This is ruining my life.
He tried praying in the privacy of his quarters, but it was like speaking to a statue, cold, unhealing, unmoved. He remembered that when he’d been a child, back home, he could always bring his tearful problems to his father. It wasn’t so much that Dad was a minister of the Lord; he was a wise and gentle father who loved his son and always tried to make things right for him. Later, in school, Grant found that even the most pious spiritual advisors didn’t have the warmth and understanding of his father. How could they?
Yet, alone and miserable on this research station half a billion kilometers from home—so distant that he couldn’t really talk with his father or wife or anyone else who loved him—Grant sought counsel.
Research Station Gold had a chapel, Grant knew from his studies of the station’s schematics. A chapel meant there must be a chaplain. Sure enough, Grant found half a dozen names in the phone computer’s listing for chaplains. To his surprise, Zareb Muzorawa was one of them, listed under Islam.
There were three Protestant ministers listed: a Baptist, a Presbyterian, and a Methodist. He tried the Methodist first, but was told that the Reverend Stanton was on a tour of duty on Europa.
In Grant’s phone screen the Presbyterian minister, the Reverend Arnold Caldwell, looked like a jolly, redcheeked character from a Dickens novel. Grant’s heart sank; Caldwell did not appear to be the kind of strong spiritual guide he needed. But he was available.
“I’ll be finished my shift here in the life-support center in less than thirty minutes,” he said cheerfully. “Why don’t you meet me in the chapel a few minutes after the hour.”
Grant agreed, fidgeted in his room for half an hour, then walked briskly to the chapel.
It was an austere compartment, about the size of three living quarters put together. A bare altar stood on a two-step-high platform. There were no decorations of any kind on the walls, not even a crucifix. Two files of empty benches could hold perhaps fifty people, at most, Grant thought.
“Ah, there you are.”
Grant turned to see the Reverend Caldwell striding up the central aisle toward him. Round in face and portly in stature, his shoulder-length hair was graying, but his eyes were bright sapphire blue and his ruddy lips were curled into a smile. He looked like a cleanshaven Santa Claus, wearing a technician’s olive-green coveralls.
“Reverend Caldwell?” Grant asked, knowing it was an inane question.
“Yes,” said Caldwell. “And you must be the young man who phoned me a bit ago.”
“Grant Archer.”
As they shook hands, Grant said, “You’re on the technical staff?”
Caldwell bobbed his head up and down enthusiastically. “Yes indeed. Station policy. There’s no room here for full-time clergy, so we all have to work at some secular job and do our ministering on our own time.”
“I see,” said Grant, thinking that explained Zeb’s listing as the Moslem minister.
“I’m with the life-support group, actually. Rather a neat combination, don’t you think? By day I worry about people’s bodies, by night I care for their souls.”
He laughed at his own joke. Grant forced a smile.
Still chuckling, Caldwell murmured, “It seems rather cold in here, doesn’t it.” Before Grant could answer, Caldwell skipped up the dais to the altar and clicked open a small door built into its side.
The chapel suddenly bloomed into a minicathedral, with stained glass windows lining the walls, a crucifixion scene from the high Renaissance behind the altar, and rows of candles burning. Grant even thought he smelled incense.
“Oh dear, wrong key,” Caldwell muttered. “That’s the Catholic scheme.”
He tried again and the elaborate decorations faded, replaced by slim windows along the side walls streaming sunlight and a gorgeous rosette of deep blues and reds on the rear wall above the entry.
“Ah, that’s better.”
“Holograms,” Grant realized. “They’re holograms.”
“Yes, of course,” said Caldwell. “Many faiths share this chamber, and no two of them agree on the proper kind of interior decoration. The Moslems allow no icons whatsoever, while the Buddhists want to see their revered one.
And so on.”
Grant nodded his understanding. Caldwell gestured to the first row of benches and they sat side by side.
Fearing that a worshipper might come in and interrupt him, Grant spilled out his story as quickly as he could, leaving out only the fact that the New Morality wanted him to spy on Dr. Wo. The Reverend Caldwell listened sympathetically, nodding, his trace of a smile ebbing slowly.
At last Grant finished with, “They’re taking four years of my life. Four years away from home, away from my wife. At least I thought I could accomplish something, earn my doctorate, but now …” He ran out of words.
“I see,” said Caldwell. “I understand.”
“What can I do?” Grant asked.
Caldwell was silent for several moments. He seemed lost in thought. His smile had faded away completely.
He heaved a mighty sigh, then said, “My son, the Lord chooses our paths for us. He has obviously sent you here for a reason.”
“But—”
“Neither you nor I can see the Lord’s purpose in all of this, but I assure you He has a design for you.”
“To be an assistant lab technician?”
“Whatever it is, you must accept it with all humility. We are all in God’s hands.”
“But my life is being ruined!”
“It may seem that way to you, but who can fathom the purposes of the Lord?”
“You’re telling me I should accept this assignment and let it go at that? I should be content to be a virtual slave?”
“You should pray for guidance, my son. And accept what cannot be altered.”
Grant shot to his feet. “That’s no help at all, Reverend.”
“I’m sorry, my son,” Caldwell said, pushing his rotund bulk up from the bench. “It’s the best advice I can offer you.”
It took an effort to bite back the angry reply that Grant wanted to make. He held his breath for a moment, then said between gritted teeth, “Well … thanks for your time, Reverend.”
Caldwell nodded, and his little smile returned. “Come to services Sunday. We have the ten o’clock hour. You’ll meet others of the faithful.”
“Yes,” Grant temporized. “Of course.”
“Perhaps if you meet others of your own age it will help you to adjust to your new life.”
“Perhaps,” Grant said.
He shook hands with the minister and turned to walk up the aisle and out of the chapel, thinking, The Lord helps those who help themselves. But what can I do to help myself? What can I do when Dr. Wo is against me?
EXPERIMENTAL ANIMALS
For weeks Grant toiled away in menial drudgery, cleaning glassware in the bio labs, looking up references for the biologists, running their tedious and often incomprehensible reports through computer spellcheck and editing programs, and even scrubbing out the fish tanks in the station’s extensive aquarium.
He quickly found that his major function was repairing old and faulty equipment. From laboratory centrifuges to a wallscreen that had developed a maddening flicker, Grant’s most intellectual pursuit was reading instruction manuals and trying to make sense of them. One whole afternoon he spent trying to free up a stubbornly stuck drawer in a biochemistry department file cabinet. He finally got the drawer open, but his fingers were battered and the knuckles of both his hands were raw and bleeding.
It was mindless work, sheer dumb labor that a trained chimpanzee could have done. Grant realized that much of the station’s equipment was outmoded and long due for replacement. Like the furniture in the living quarters, like the cafeteria and the threadbare carpeting along the main corridor, the laboratory equipment was shabby.
His schedule seemed to be at odds with those of the few friends he had made. Only rarely did he see Karlstad or Muzorawa or any of the others he knew, and when they did manage to sit together in the cafeteria, they discussed their work, the scientific problems they were struggling with. All Grant could talk about was his hours of sweatshop labor.
Muzorawa introduced him to two more members of the small team focused on Jupiter itself: Patricia Buono was a medical doctor, short, plump, with curly honey-blond hair so thick and heavy that Grant wondered how she could keep her head up under the load. Kayla Ukara was from Tanzania, her skin even darker than Zeb’s, her eyes seething with a fierce emotion that Grant could not fathom; she seemed perpetually on guard, always ready to snap or snarl.
Karlstad grinned when Grant told him he had met the two women.
“Patti and Kayla,” he said, with a knowing air. “The butterball and the panther.”
“Panther,” Grant mused. Yes, it suited Ukara, he thought. A prowling black cat, sleek and powerful and dangerous.
“Know what Patti’s name translates to?” Karlstad asked, still grinning.
“What?”
“Patti Buono … it means ‘pat well.’”
Grant shook his head. Dr. Buono seemed more motherly than sexy. “She’s not my type,” he said.
“Mine, neither. I like ’em long and lean, like Lainie.”
Grant attended chapel services most Sundays, but the people he met there seemed totally indifferent to him. A newcomer, he was not part of their social life. And he didn’t know how to break into their cliques and make friends with them.
Then, one Sunday, he saw Tamiko Hideshi at the worship service. Delighted to see a familiar, friendly face, Grant slipped out of his pew to sit next to her.
“I didn’t know you were a Presbyterian,” Grant said as they left the chapel together.
“I’m not,” she said with a toothy grin. “But they don’t have any Shinto services, so I rotate among the services that are available. Today is my Presbyter Sunday.”
“You go to all the services?”
“Only one per week,” she said. “It’s like being a spy, sort of: checking on the competition.”
Grant’s breath caught when she said spy, but Tami’s cheerful expression showed she had no inkling of his own situation.
He bumped into Lane O’Hara now and then, mostly in the aquarium, but she was strictly business, a staff scooter telling a grad student which chore had to be done next. Now and then he saw her swimming in the tank with the dolphins, a sleek white wetsuit covering her completely yet revealing every curve of her lean, lithe body. She swam among them happily, playfully, as if she were at home with the dolphins, glad to be with them in their element, much friendlier to them than she was to Grant.
Every night Grant prayed for release from his slavery. How am I going to get a doctorate when I’m stuck washing glassware and fixing broken-down equipment?
He felt so depressed, so ashamed of how low he had fallen, that he couldn’t bring himself to talk about it in his messages to Marjorie. Guardedly, he told his parents about the situation. His mother was nearly in tears when she replied; his father counseled patience.
“They’re just testing you, I’m certain. Do your best and soon enough they’ll see that you’re too talented to remain a lab helper. This is a test, you’ll see.”
Grant hoped his father was right but didn’t believe a word of it. He begged his parents not to reveal his problem to Marjorie.
He tried to be upbeat and smiling when he spoke to his wife, avoiding any mention of the work he was doing. Worst of all, he realized he was not accomplishing one iota of progress toward his doctorate in astrophysics. There wasn’t even another astrophysicist in the station to serve as his mentor-assuming he had time to continue his studies.
Marjorie’s messages to him became rarer, as well. She was obviously busy and immersed in her work. She still seemed cheerful and energetic, smiling into the camera for him even when she looked tired and sheened with perspiration. Often she appeared to be in a tent or in some clearing in a tropical forest. Once he saw a raging fire behind her, hot flames licking angrily through the trees and thick oily black smoke billowing skyward, while heavily armed troops in the sky-blue helmets of the International Peacekeeping Force prowled past. Yet she always seemed ch
ipper, enthusiastic, telling Grant excitedly of their success in tracking down hidden drug factories or caches of biological weapons.
Yet Grant saw something in Marjorie’s bright, joyful face that puzzled him. For weeks he tried to determine what it was. And then it hit him. She was pleased with herself! She was delighted with the work she was doing, excited to be helping to make the world better, safer— while all Grant was doing was janitorial work in a remote station hundreds of millions of kilometers from home.
And he realized one other thing, as well. Marjorie no longer ended her messages with a count of the hours until they would be reunited.
I’ve lost her, Grant told himself. By the time I get back to Earth we’ll be strangers to each other.
Still he could not bring himself to mention his fears to Marjorie. He could not tell her of his loneliness, his weariness, his growing desperation. He tried to be cheerful and smiling when he spoke to her, knowing that she was doing the same in her messages to him. Is she trying to keep my spirits up? Grant asked himself. Or is she just being kind to me? Does she still love me?
Then he wondered if he still loved her, and was shocked to realize that he did not know whether he did or not.
He saw Sheena often enough, shambling through the narrow corridor of the aquarium or sitting quietly in her glassteel pen, munching on mountains of celery and melons. The gorilla was like a two-year-old child: Her repertoire of behaviors was quickly exhausted and her conversation was limited to a dozen simple declarations. In the back of his mind Grant marveled at the fact that he could accept a talking gorilla as commonplace.
On the other hand, Sheena was so massive and strong that she frightened Grant, even though she showed no indication of violence. But every time he looked into the gorilla’s deep brown eyes he saw something there, some spark of intelligence that was chained inside her hugely powerful body. Grant had nightmares of Sheena suddenly turning into a roaring, smashing, murderous beast who grabbed him in her enormous hands and began to tear him apart.
