Jupiter Project

by Gregory Benford

  Mom didn’t have any advice about that one, other than to suggest that I go see Commander Aarons about it. I knew that wouldn’t work. So I talked about other things, and eventually we got around to the things Zak had said to me while I was out there, and about Earthside and my memories and all. I told Mom how I felt. It wasn’t easy.

  “Yes, I remember Dr. Matonin mentioning that to me,” Mom said.

  “Huh? When?”

  “Oh, years ago.”

  “How’d she know?”

  “Why, they have a profile on everyone.”

  “Why’d she never say anything to me about it?”

  “I suppose she thought it wouldn’t do any good.”

  “She told you.”

  “Only to make me more aware of the problem. We weren’t gossiping behind your back, Matt.”

  “What was the good Doctor’s therapy?” I asked dryly.

  Mom smiled. “No therapy. There’s a limit to what anyone else can do about these things, Matt.”

  “Right,” I muttered gruffly. “Damned right.”

  Something in that conversation crystallized my thoughts. I felt a slow, sullen anger building up inside me. I went over to the storage shed and threw bags of fertilizer onto the slideways. Hefting them up and dumping them down gave my muscles a chance to do my thinking for me. Long ago I’d learned that when I felt this way, a workout was the best solution. Fertilizer bags can’t fight back.

  And as I sweated and grunted it all started to make sense. Doctor Matonin and her mother-henning. Those dumb Socials. Yuri’s father, making his son look like a fool by acting out some antique dream of Earthside. They were all putting blinders on us, shaping us with their dimly remembered ideas about growing up.

  I thought about Jenny. The only time we had really said anything worth a damn to each other was on Roadhog. Outside the Can. On our own. Away from all the eyes and ever-ready advice. Away from the rules and guidelines, and the whole goddam suffocating adult world.

  I had learned something out there in the long, black hours on Roadhog. I would have seen it eventually, I knew, if I’d just kept on with the orbital missions. My crazy run to get the Faraday cup had just speeded up the process. Getting outside the Can gave you a perspective. It was a big help to look back on your whole life and see it stuffed into a tin box, literally see it for the tight little world it was. Because otherwise, you’d buy the official Can point of view. You’d go along. And you’d never really grow up. You’d turn into a Zak, wiseassing your way through life. Or a Yuri, crippled by a blockhead parent. That was the danger of compression, of packing people so close together they had to get along. In those circumstances, everybody had to back down, live life according to the consensus rules.

  That might be okay if you were already an adult. You had your own internal gyroscope then. You knew where you were headed. But to grow up you had to take risks. That was the key. You had to do what seemed right to you, not right to the majority.

  To stop being a kid you had to have the right to be wrong. And that was what the Can couldn’t tolerate. So the quiet, steady pressure was on. Don’t step out of line. Don’t let yourself go. Don’t let passion or anger sweep you away.

  Well, screw that. I thought back over the last month and I could see how I’d been acting. One minute I was the cooperative, likable Matt, and the next I was filled with doubts, worries. Typical adolescent stuff. But my dopey ride out to get that Faraday cup had changed something inside me now. I had risked something—my life—and those long dark hours arcing back to the Can had changed me. Right, it had been a stupid gamble. So what? The point was, I took it. I did something for me, not for the Jupiter Project. It wasn’t like the hike I look on Ganymede to get the air bottles. I did that because Yuri challenged me. Going for the Faraday cup was for me, not for the Can.

  So I made a promise to myself. Growing up was painful, sure. But I was going to do it. I was going to make Matt Bohles the way he wanted to be. I was going to face risks—risks of all kinds. When the time came, I was going to change. If you want to grow, you have to gamble.

  I slaved away for two more hours harvesting bean sprouts. It’s wet work. The vaporizers pump out clouds of big, wobbly bubbles that take forever to fall in the low G. They blow into the sprout paddies, cloudy with nutrients. You get soaked. You can inhale one through your nostrils if you don’t watch it.

  I was loading bags of sprouts onto the conveyor when I noticed the guy who was delivering the recycled bags. It was Yuri.

  He looked at me for a long moment. I knew I could turn away and wade back into the paddies. He wouldn’t follow me, particularly since he didn’t have hip boots on. But that wasn’t the right way to handle it.

  I walked over to him. keeping my hands relaxed at my sides. “Sorry about that.” I said.

  He grimaced. “I think you will soon be more than sorry.”

  “Doesn’t seem likely.”

  “Your luck will not carry you forever.”

  “You have a point.” He started to turn away. “Look, Yuri, there’s something I want to ask you. Why have you been riding me?”

  He halted. A puzzled look crossed his face. “I… I had to, Bohles. You were ahead of me.”

  “So?”

  “I…my talents are not the same as yours, but…the Laboratory rewards your…sort…more than mine.”

  “So what? Who says you have to win on their terms?”

  Yuri looked at me blankly. “We are…not alike. I have different…ideas about…”

  “It’s your father, isn’t it? He’s been pushing you.”

  “It must be obvious even to you that our families are different. My father has strong ideas…”

  “Look, he made you dress up in that—”

  Yuri scowled and I saw that I had gone too far. He didn’t want to remember that.

  “Garbage, Bohles, garbage. If you can’t take the competition, get out.”

  “That’s not what I meant. You and me could—”

  “Don’t give me any goddam breaks, Bohles,” Yuri snapped, and marched away.

  I shrugged. Some games you can’t win. Some gambles you lose.

  I worked off my aggressions on the bean sprouts. That tired me out, but it didn’t stop me from thinking about J-11.

  I went out for a drink that evening, with Jenny. We talked about the Jovian life-form, and the flood of questions that needed answering. The bio types were doing flip-flops, changing theories faster than they changed their underwear.

  The saga of Rebecca and Isaac was by now common scuttlebutt, too, so I gave in to Jenny’s questions and told her about it. Now that I thought about the whole thing, it was more funny than embarrassing.

  And through it all, I fell an odd hovering presence between Jenny and me. We edged toward the subject slowly, but each of us sensed that the other wanted to talk, talk the way we had before. I found myself agreeing with her. “I’ve felt it, too,” I said quietly. “They don’t want us to get emotionally involved, I guess. So, almost without thinking about it, they’ve set up the Can…”

  Jenny finished it for me. “For their age group, not ours.”

  “Yeah.”

  “A programmed world.”

  “And in a way, they’re right,” I said. “This is a damned dangerous place. Ishi…” My voice trailed off.

  Jenny said, “When you add all that, on top of all the crap separating men and women already…”

  “Yeah. The distrust. The anger.”

  “And the just plain awkwardness. But we’ve got to overcome it.”

  “How?”

  “By being ourselves.” Jenny said.

  “It’s hard to be yourself when you’re in a fishbowl.”

  “You mean when everybody’s watching.”

  “Right.”

  “You know…” She smiled a quiet, mischievous smile that I had seen a few times and liked a lot. “It is hard to get any privacy around here. But I know a place.”

  “Where?”

/>   “I do some of my chore time in the infirmary. There’s a reserve room, kept stocked with med stations and beds, in case of a major accident. Not many people even know it’s there, we use it so seldom.” She looked at me sideways and bit her lip. A hesitant turn crept into her smile.

  “We might get caught.”

  “I suppose so.”

  I felt an odd electric tingling. A quickening, nervous energy.

  To grow, gamble.

  What can you say about it? That all the thousands of hours you spent trying to imagine it never prepared you for the real thing. That it really is different from anything else. And that yet in a way it’s like a lot of other things, physical and emotional, all merged and heightened and more intense. You’re clumsy, sure. But there’s something about it that takes you out of yourself and into some other place. And it takes you into the person you’re with.

  There’s all that, sure. But mostly it’s a huge, gaudy kind of fun.

  When Jenny and I left the infirmary I felt emotions that were new to me. Love, maybe: it’s hard to tell. I know the things you feel when you’re an adolescent are going to change with time, the way everybody and everything does—but still, the warm aura that surrounded us was real, not some kid’s delusion. I wasn’t just feeling the “release of tension” the manuals tell you about, it was more like Jenny and I had been to a place that you can’t get to without something very special happening. Exactly what all that meant, we’d find out in time. For now, it was enough to have been there.

  As we ambled along the dimly lit nighttime corridors, I said, “Y’know, it’s funny, how some things are right in front of you and still you don’t see them.”

  “Ummm. Such as?”

  “I had to be jolted into paying attention. Into taking my nose off the grindstone.”

  “Oh?” Jenny arched her eyebrows.

  “That stunt of mine, flying out to Satellite Fourteen. The regular Matt Bohles wouldn’t have done that.”

  “Probably not.”

  “I guess all this—yeah, including my interest in you—started with Ishi.”

  She looked at me. “How?”

  “Well. I started thinking of these things, you know.”

  “But not about me in particular?”

  “Well, no, not at first.”

  Jenny was looking at me in a funny way. “You mean, it was because Ishi died? Not because of something he said?”

  “No, because he died. It… I don’t know, everything seemed different after that.”

  “Yes,” she said softly, “it was.”

  The next day I did more chore work, lugging sacks of compost. It was the only kind of thing I felt like doing. Halfway through the morning I got a comm call. It was Commander Aarons’ office. They wanted me at a meeting in one hour. I went back to work and mulled it over. Probably a more thorough debriefing of my Satellite Fourteen run, I guessed. ISA would want them to dot all the i’s and cross all the t’s.

  When I got there, all changed into a new suit, there wasn’t anybody I’d expected. No Dr. Kadin, no Mr. Jablons. Commander Aarons’ secretary—a guy I knew from the squash ladder—made me sit and wait. I could hear some loud talking from the inner office; the sealite partitions can only muffle so much. I couldn’t make out who was talking.

  A light flashed on the secretary’s console. He told me to go on in.

  Sitting in a chair across from the Commander’s desk was Yuri’s father.

  “I thought you might be interested in Dr. Sagdaeff’s complaint. He has filed it against you,” Aarons said.

  Dr. Sagdaeff said stiffly, “I see no reason why he should be here. This is a disciplinary matter—”

  “Oh, it’s more than that.”

  I began, “Look, sir. I’d just as soon avoid—”

  “No, sit down.” Aarons said. “This is indeed more than a disciplinary matter. State your case, Dr. Sagdaeff.”

  Yuri’s father frowned and glanced at me. “Briefly, we all know what this boy did to Yuri. Assault, that is the term, I believe. And the boy risked his own life, and destroyed valuable equipment, in a foolhardy stunt.”

  “Hey, there—”

  Aarons silenced me with a raised palm. Yuri’s father went on. “However, you are certainly aware that the feeling in the Laboratory runs strongly in favor of this boy. He was, I’ll admit, very fortunate. But that does not erase the offense against my son.”

  “Agreed.” Commander Aarons made a steeple of his fingers and peered at them.

  “And it is not a trivial offense. Yuri could have been seriously hurt.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “What is more, my son, by trying to stop this boy, has been made to look like the villain. It appears to me that, even beyond the issue of punishment for the assault, one should consider the harm to my son’s prestige among his co-workers.”

  I was seething, but I kept my trap shut. Commander Aarons tapped on his desk top with a pen. “And so…?”

  “I ask that, to compensate my son, he be included in the crew which goes to investigate the J-11.”

  “What?” I cried. “What can he do that—”

  “Quiet.” Commander Aarons shifted forward, putting his elbows on his desk and peering at Dr. Sagdaeff. “Of course, none of this is a coincidence. I am sure you have already learned, Dr. Sagdaeff, that one of the Sagan crew has been injured. A deep cut, from a loading accident. She must be replaced.”

  Yuri’s father smiled slightly and nodded.

  Aarons glowered. He seemed to get larger. “But to come to me with this case—incredible, sir, incredible. I am not in the business of insuring your son’s reputation. I am not a settler of petty disputes. And I will not be pushed into making assignments on a political basis.”

  Yuri’s father twisted his mouth. “I hope you realize what harm this decision can do to your own position, eh? There are those in ISA who believe you have been altogether too arbitrary already in your policies. I would expect—”

  Aarons stood up. “That, sir, is too much. Your faction is well known to me. I hear about your maneuverings constantly. But you do not have to insure the safety of this Laboratory. Your only obligation is to complain.”

  “I think that is a totally unfair—”

  “To hell with your idea of fairness.”

  “—and your own attitude will be well documented, I assure—”

  “Your son is inexperienced at long flights outside the Can. He is unqualified,” Commander Aarons said stiffly.

  “No more so than others. I feel he is owed—”

  “I will not have you strong-arming me with your ISA connections. Out!”

  “What?” Dr. Sagdaeff looked surprised. “You cannot insult a senior member of the staff by ordering him to—”

  “Out! Or do I have to assist you to the door?”

  Yuri’s father froze for a moment, reassessing the situation. It obviously hadn’t gone the way he thought it would. “I hope you realize—”

  “Out!”

  Dr. Sagdaeff stood slowly and turned toward the door.

  “Oh, yes.” Aarons said, a little of the steam leaving his voice, “I suppose I do owe you the favor of being the first to hear the announcement. Dr. Sagdaeff. Seeing as how you are a senior member of the staff and all that.” He smiled without mirth. “I had chosen the replacement before you even came to see me. I made the decision before you could try to put your political spin on it, you see. What Sagan needs is somebody with experience on shuttle-type craft.”

  He pointed at me. “And there he is.”

  Chapter 16

  It took two more days to outfit the Sagan for an extra-long flight. I spent most of the time working with Mr. Jablons on the Faraday cups. The biologists were concentrating on the spores themselves so much, nobody had taken the time to figure out how we found them in the first place.

  After some tinkering, we figured out why the cup on Satellite Seventeen had cleared up after it had left the region above the poles. It turned o
ut that the spores had their charge bled away after a few hours of contact with the grid and plate. Simple electrical conduction. When their charge vanished they were no longer attracted to the grid, so they gradually drifted out and away into space.

  But the biologists had the limelight. Everybody wanted details and everybody had a half-baked theory. Dr. Kadin held a seminar that packed the auditorium. Earth kept the laser comm net saturated with questions, and they televised Dr. Kadin’s talk for prime-time showing Earthside.

  In the question session afterward, somebody asked why the older cup I had replaced hadn’t shorted out, too. I had to admit I didn’t know. Maybe the cups didn’t have exactly identical electrical characteristics. Or maybe only a few of the storms carried spores. I had no idea. As the scientists say when they want to wriggle out from under, that aspect of the problem will be left for future research.

  I trained for my job. We were taking along a shuttlecraft that had been in storage. It was outfitted with better detectors and special equipment, hydraulics and electron-beam cutters and omnisensors. We would carry it out on the hull of the Sagan. I was to be the pilot. I named it Roadhog. Sentimental, I guess.

  There was a big, noisy crowd saying good-bye at the main lock. Somebody was taking 3D scans for Earthside media hype. I said good-bye solemnly to my mother and waved at friends. Zak thumped me on the back, grinning.

  “Hold the fort.” I said. I grabbed Jenny and gave her a long kiss that unfocused her eyes. I shook hands in a manly, exaggerated way with Zak. Then I lugged my gear out to the Sagan.

  It took three days to reach J-11. We maneuvered into a parallel orbit thirty klicks away from it and the scientists got busy peering at it in the optical, infrared, UV, and beyond. J-11 was an unappetizing lump of rock, a flying mountain. Jagged peaks caught the sunlight and pooled the low spots in shadow. The whole thing was barely thirty klicks across at its longest dimension. There were no snowdrifts or clumps of ice clinging in dark corners, just cratered granite-gray rock. That suggested it had not condensed out of the primordial soup around Jupiter. It was probably a captured asteroid, tugged into orbit by tidal forces long ago.