“Oh. I didn’t realize that.”
“We’re civilians, we don’t think in those terms. The Commander will never mention it, but it’s a bald fact. After we’re Earthside we’ll see a story in the fine print of a newsfax somewhere, and that will be it.”
Jenny was quiet after that; I don’t think she had realized quite what was going on.
We took the Roadhog again, with me in the pilot’s chair. The orbit was already in Roadhog’s computer with a launch time about fifteen minutes later than we needed; I had asked the bridge for the margin, just in case I couldn’t find Jenny right away.
Jupiter was a brownish, banded crescent, thinner than it was during our last flight. We boosted away from the Can on a long, elliptical orbit. Changing from equatorial to polar orbit costs fuel and time. We had to alter our velocity vector quite a bit to make rendezvous. Flight time was over six hours. I settled down to wait but I kept nervously checking meters and controls. I was jumpy.
“Hey, sei still, Freund,” Jenny said. “Was gibt?”
“What gives? Oh, maybe I’m worried about meteoroids.” I said, knowing I wasn’t.
“I know what you mean.” Jenny said, taking me seriously. “I found out from the bridge that Ishi was caught in one of those funny swarms we’ve been having.”
“What? Why didn’t they warn him?”
“The swarm was well clear of him, on radar. There must’ve been some small stuff that didn’t show. It looked okay.”
“How come they’re letting us go out at all?”
“There’s a lull, they say. No bunches of meteoroids coming in from the asteroid belt—”
“If that’s where they’re from. We don’t know a frapping thing about them, or these storms, or what in hell is going to happen to us, to the Lab, to…”
“Hey, hey, easy,” Jenny said softly, patting my gloved hand. “Just talk them out slowly. Don’t let all your problems stack up on you.”
So we talked. I told her about the mess with Yuri, about how I was angry and scared of him at the same time. I couldn’t put it into words very well. My feelings were all mixed up inside. Compared to me Jenny seemed serene and sure of herself, and after talking to her I began to feel a little better, too. Between check-ins with the bridge, monitoring the storm activity, eating and getting some rest, we talked and mused about what was happening out here. The time passed quickly.
Satellite Seventeen was a glimmering white dot that swelled into a tarnished ball, even more decrepit than Satellite Fourteen. There were grainy patches where the polished metal skin had dulled and turned bluish-gold, for some reason. I snapped a few photographs for Mr. Jablons.
It took pretty long to install the new Faraday cups. The adhesive patch on my chest was crowded with components and I had to be sure I had all the microchips right.
Jenny left the Roadhog to help because it was impossible for me to hold everything in place and make high-vacuum welds at the same time. I couldn’t even use magnetic clamps to hold all the parts in place, either, since the fields might disturb some of the instruments inside the satellite.
The bridge and Monitoring both confirmed proper functioning of the new Faraday cup; I thought I recognized Dad’s voice.
Roadhog’s ion engine boosted us over to intercept Satellite Fourteen, firing at maximum thrust all the way to make up time I had lost fiddling with Seventeen. I spotted it and tried to shave a little time off by doing the approach on manual. My distance perception was a little faulty; I overshot and had to backtrack with maneuvering jets.
Jenny handled a lot of the dog work on the installation this time. My reflexes were fouled up a little from simple muscle fatigue, but we got everything working well inside the bridge’s allotted time. The window for our return orbit opened just as we were battening down. I gunned her hard enough to see a thin violet trail behind us, and we were on our way home.
Somebody once said that spaceflight is hours of boredom punctuated by seconds of terror. Well, there isn’t much terror in shuttle work but there is plenty of boredom. Jenny and I slept most of the way back. The bridge woke me up once to report a steady rise in storm activity on Jupiter. I acknowledged, and thought I spotted more of those funny whirlpools before I fell asleep again. At the time I didn’t much care if there was a three ring circus on Jupiter, complete with clowns; I was tired.
When I tucked Roadhog into her berth I topped off her fuel tanks and started running through a series of maintenance checks to be sure the instruments were still okay.
“Hey, don’t you want to get inside?” Jenny said. She had just woken up and was grumpy.
“Sure.” I said over suit radio. “But I want to be sure Roadhog is ready to go out right away if I need her.”
“Ummm.” She stretched. “We’ve been out in her—what?—fourteen hours. Some time to suddenly become a stickler.”
“Tourist!”
“Ummmm.”
“A working cowboy waters his horse before he gets anything to drink himself.”
“She’s a horse now, is she? I thought she was a roadhog.”
“Come on,” I grinned at her through my faceplate. “I’ll race you to the airlock. And—special today only, folks—I’ll buy you that drink.”
“Lead the way, my swain.”
I woke up late the next morning with a funny ringing buzz in my head and eyes that didn’t want to focus. Getting out of bed almost convinced me that the spin had been taken off the Can and my bedroom was now at zero-g—nothing moved quite right.
I recognized the symptoms. I had felt the same way when Dad introduced me to the black currant wine Mom brought down from Hydroponics; with no resistance or experience, it doesn’t take very much to addle your brains.
Jenny and I hadn’t really drunk a lot, but I guess it makes a difference what you drink, too. I’d experimented with hard liquor while she sipped an aperitif wine. The evening had gone rather well: we sat in a corner of the darkened bar, meriting a few puzzled glances from the watch officers who came in after leaving duty. There was no one else around at those early morning hours, so our baptism into the rites of elders went unobserved by our friends, just the way we wanted it. We talked about the various illusions the sexes have, and how hard it is to see through them. It wasn’t so much what was said, as how we said it. No resounding conclusions, but I learned a lot.
Then I had walked her home and kissed her good night. Now I had a hangover. How could life be more complete?
After a solid breakfast to get my blood sugar count up again. I felt pretty good. I resolved to learn a bit more about liquor before I tried some of the more exotic brands of rocket fuel the bar offered.
I got down to the Student Center during what would have been the normal morning coffee break, if these had been normal times. Kids were milling around the corridors trading rumors, with a particularly big clump at the bulletin board. I shouldered my way up near the front and saw a single typed notice:
PLEASE NOTE THAT IF, REPEAT, IF A SKELETON CREW IS LEFT BEHIND AT THE LABORATORY, ONLY SINGLE MEN OF MATURE YEARS WILL BE CONSIDERED.
COMMANDER AARONS
“Pooh!” a girl next to me said. “That boils it down to ship’s officers.”
“And some technicians.” a boy said.
“And me.” I put in.
“Didn’t you read it all?” the girl said. “That ‘of mature years’ translates as ‘no kids’.”
“Eighteen should be old enough,” I said.
“Uh uh.” the boy said. “That just means you’re legally entitled to vote and carry a gun.”
“What’s a better definition of maturity?” I said sharply.
The guy shrugged. “Fight it out with Aarons if you want. I’m just giving you an educated guess.”
“I need more than a guess.”
I turned and worked my way out of the mob again. There weren’t many kids in the Can in all, but they all seemed to be hanging around the Center. I wondered if any work was getting done, and then re
alized that it probably didn’t matter to most of them; they had already mentally adjusted to the idea of shipping Earthside. It was a depressing revelation.
“Hey! Where you going?”
“Oh, hi Zak.” I stopped at the edge of the crowd. “I’m going to the bridge.”
“Don’t. I’ve already tried that gambit. Fifty other people thought of it first; the place is packed. They’re not giving out any information, either.”
“They’ve got to explain that notice.”
“They haven’t ‘got’ to do anything. The Commander probably wanted to stop people from pestering him with questions, so he eliminated most of them by ruling out women and married men. That’s most of the Lab right there.”
“What about us?”
“Who knows? Maybe they’ll let eighteen-year-olds stay. Or maybe the Commander will stick with men who’ve been on the job a long time. I wouldn’t be surprised if he kept it down to only officers.”
“Why would he do that?”
“Figure it out. What have they got to lose? Earthside they’ll be stripped of their commissions for disobeying orders. Why should they go back at all?”
“Well, I hope they don’t fill all the slots.”
“You really want to stay, don’t you?” Zak said, looking at me oddly.
“Sure. Don’t you?”
“Yes, but I’m not a fanatic about it. It’s going to be pretty chancy staying in the Can without the Argosy and Rambler as backups.”
“Think of all the material you would get for your diary. It would be an automatic bestseller.”
“Huh! Boswell—the one who wrote Life of Samuel Johnson—used to feel that he hadn’t really lived a day until he had written it up in his diary. I’m not that compulsive. There are better reasons to do things than just so you can put them in your diary.”
“No more exciting chronicles of life among the supermen?”
“Not unless they pick me for the skeleton crew. Besides, there are some doubts buried deep in my poetic soul about the whole business.”
“Huh?” I glanced at a wall clock. “Say, I want to get over to Monitoring to see my father. Come along for the walk, you probably need the exercise—”
“Health nut!”
“—and you can explain that last statement.”
We went inward a few levels by elevator and started walking through a tangle of laboratories to reach Monitoring.
“Look.” Zak said, spreading his hands, “call me a groundhog if you must, but it seems to me there’s an ethical problem here. ISA is calling us back because Earth needs the money for social problems. Things are tough back there. People are eating sea yeast patties and living in each others’ hip pockets.”
“So are we.”
“Voluntarily. Those people in India didn’t raise their hands, they were born into it. What right do we or ISA or anybody have to take away money that might help them out?”
I walked along in silence for a moment “I don’t know. Maybe we haven’t got a moral leg to stand on. But something tells me there’s more to it. The same logic would have kept Columbus at home until all of Europe’s slums were emptied.”
“Right.”
“How long would that be?”
“Uh? To clear the slums? Oh, I see. They’re still there.”
“And always will be. We keep upgrading the definition of ‘slum.’ Even so, I still don’t think your argument stays afloat.” I ambled along, hands stuck in my pockets, thinking. “I can’t help but feel something basic will be lost if we give up ideas like the Jupiter Project. They’re dreams—the things men live by.”
“There will be other times in the future when we can come back out here.”
“Yeah? When? A thousand years? There have been eras in Earth’s history when men sat on their hands for that long, too poor or weak or scared to try something new. It could happen again, easy.”
“Maybe so and maybe not. You don’t know that would happen.”
“There’s the trick: you never know. Life is riding by the seat of your pants. We think new knowledge will pay off, sometime, but we aren’t sure. All we know is that it always has before. Why should knowing about Jupiter be profitable? No answer. We don’t know until we come. Is terraforming Ganymede a good idea? We won’t know the answer to that one for a century or so, if then. Except if we don’t do it where are we ever going to set up a self-supporting colony? The sociologists say small isolated communities are the best long term places for people. They keep people happy and productive. Ganymede might be a test of that in the long run—Earth hasn’t fit that description in centuries.
“That’s the whole trouble; the whole history of the human race has been one long unrepeatable experiment. Nobody’s ever going to figure us out. So we might as well try everything we can, even if it hurts a little, to see what doors it opens up.”
“Lecture over?”
“Yeah. Sorry.”
“That’s okay. I have a funny feeling you’re right. It feels right, anyway. Something has got to be wrong with a system that says Michelangelo shouldn’t have taken money to do the Sistine Chapel as long as everybody wasn’t eating prime beef.”
I nodded. The walls of the corridor were painted in a red spiral to give the feeling of depth, but at the moment the effect just made me a little dizzy. We came to Monitoring and Zak waved good-bye. I went in.
Dad looked up from his notes. Mr. Jablons was with him.
“Come on in, son. You’re just in time to see if your Faraday cup design holds up.”
Chapter 13
There was a third man I vaguely recognized, wearing African robes.
“Matt, this is Dr. Kadin. He is the Laboratory Science Director.” Dr. Kadin bowed slightly and smiled. I remembered that he was Dad’s boss: in fact, he was the head of all the scientific research done in the Can and on Ganymede. I made the appropriate introductory noises while I tried to figure out why he was here.
“There are large storms brewing at Jupiter’s poles.” Dr. Kadin said to me. “Over the last few weeks I have been working with the astrophysicists to find an explanation. We have had little success. We do, however, think the storms may be throwing great swarms of electrons and other particles completely out of the Jovian atmosphere. Once above the ammonia cloud layer, they may become caught in Jupiter’s magnetic fields and funneled into the Van Allen belts. It is, of course, only a hypothesis.” He smiled again, showing incredibly white teeth.
“It’s a good thing you installed those new cups,” Mr. Jablons put in. “They’ll give us much better resolution of the electron concentration around Satellites Seventeen and Fourteen.”
“Because Seventeen and Fourteen pass close over the poles?” I said.
“Correct,” Dr. Kadin said precisely. “If your design can function under high particle flux, we may be able to record some highly significant data. There are some theoretical reasons to believe these particles originated deep in the Jovian atmosphere, perhaps deeper than we have ever been able to probe before.”
“When does it happen?” I said.
Dad glanced at a clock. “About now. I’ve been trying to reach you at home and down at the Student Center, with no luck. Thought you might want to watch. Satellite Seventeen should enter the polar region any moment.”
Dad thumbed the panel on his desk and his viewscreen began registering a readout from the Hole. The watch officer had set up a simple moving graph to show the particle flux that Satellite Seventeen was registering. The black line had already started a gradual climb. We all crowded around the screen, just about filling Dad’s office.
“That is an expected result,” Dr. Kadin said after a moment. He poked a finger at the rising line. “We can correlate this data with information from other equatorial satellites, to find the energy and other characteristics of the particles. The important point is how high this line can go.”
Mr. Jablons shuffled nervously. We waited, watching the line climb faster and faster. The only sound
was a background whirr of air circulation.
The line rose, rose—and then dropped. It fell straight down to zero.
Dr. Kadin frowned. “It should not do that.”
We waited.
My face began to feel hot.
The line didn’t move.
“The Faraday cup may have shorted out,” Mr. Jablons said finally.
“Yes. It would seem so.” Dr. Kadin glanced at me, then looked quickly away. “Unfortunate.”
My father cleared his throat. “If the instrument has failed there is nothing to be done.”
“But it couldn’t fail!” I said.
“Quiet, son. Remember, Dr. Kadin, Satellite Fourteen crosses the same region above the pole in—” a look at the display screen—“three hours. We can get some data then.”
“Yes. Good.” He looked at me, not smiling. “The old Faraday cup would have given at least some information throughout the satellite’s passage over the pole. Hummm. Well—I shall return in three hours.”
With that he swept from the office, red robes fluttering.
Dad and Mr. Jablons tried to cheer me up but I wasn’t having any. We all knew that design worked. I must have installed it wrong. Maybe the job on Fourteen, with Jenny helping, was okay. Maybe.
One thing was clear; the radiation level in the Van Allen belts was rising fast. Dad made a note to advise the bridge and recommend that no men or craft be allowed outside the Can for the duration of the storm. I fooled around in the Hole, keeping tabs on Satellite Fourteen while it orbited up from the equator toward Jupiter’s north pole, toward the splotchy indigo storms.
After a while I took a break and wandered down to the Center. I was feeling pretty rotten. I ran into Jenny and she told me about a square dance that evening. That cheered me up; it would take my mind off everything that was going wrong with my life. Normally I dance as if someone was firing pistols at my feet, but with Jenny…
That’s when I got an idea. I looked around for an intercom phone and asked Jenny to wait a minute.
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