Jupiter Project

Chapter 9

There isn’t much to say about the rest of that night. At first I could not believe it: as soon as the curtain was drawn I rushed over to Commander Aarons and asked, disbelieving, if I had heard him correctly. Hadn’t it been someone else, somebody with a name that sounded like Ishi?

Even as I said it I knew I was trying to run away from the truth, cover it up, pretend it wasn’t there. I turned away from the Commander and automatically, mechanically put my guitar back in its case. The air seemed heavy and warm.

I remember making my way out of the auditorium. I met my parents. I talked to Jenny. She was crying and I suddenly found that I was, too. Jenny and I stood in the middle of the crowd, crying and sobbing and holding each other, almost without knowing what we were doing. It was incredible. Ishi, gone. Forever.

After a few moments I recovered a bit. Zak was there; I hadn’t seen him before. He took Jenny away and I left with my parents. Suddenly I wanted to get away from that place and away from people.

We said nothing during the walk home. The terrible thing was that there was nothing to do. I guess there never is. Our society has no required ritual for friends and relatives of someone who has died. Instead, they sit and stare at each other and feel awkward, useless. They have no way to take the edge off their grief. I thought about that for a while until I realized that I was using the idea as a way to avoid thinking about Ishi, because that was too painful. And, of course, that thought made me feel even more rotten.

When we got home I went to my room. There didn’t seem to be anything to say to my parents, or to anybody, Ishi’s job had been one of the dangerous ones, sure, but the computed chances of a man ever being hit were infinitesimal. His death was a fantastic piece of bad luck. Space suits provide some protection against low-velocity meteoroids, but there isn’t much that can be done about a pebble traveling faster than a rifle bullet.

The Lab does what it can. We’ve searched out the dust clouds and small swarms of gravel orbiting Jupiter. When a shuttle goes out, the trajectory is programmed to keep the craft moving in the same direction as the matter around it, so that most of the tiny debris isn’t zipping by the shuttle. The best insurance is a fast trip, so the pilot spends as little time possible outside the Can.

All these things are fine, but they can’t add up to absolute safety. We don’t know enough about the junk circling Jupiter and we never will—radar won’t pick up small chips of rock.

So I laid in bed and thought about these things. And remembered Ishi. And wondered how many times in my life I would say good-bye to a friend, suspecting nothing, and then never see him again. It took me a long time to get to sleep.

The next morning our family went to extend condolences to Ishi’s family. We sat on the floor and conversed, almost whispering. Most of our talk was of inconsequential things: flower arranging, the comings and goings of people we both knew, the subtlety of watercolor prints. We spoke only briefly of Ishi.

We attended the service for Ishi together. His body was returned to the life cycle of the Can by breaking it down and distributing the elements to the chemical vats. Preserving the body and things of that sort are barbaric.

We followed the Moto family to their home and spoke for a long while. We were served green tea. We smiled, nodded. We went home.

I found the experience strangely satisfying. The Moto family maintained its serenity; it even buoyed up the friends who came to call. I promised myself that I would not let the Moto family slip out of contact; I could learn much from them.

I moped around the apartment for half an hour and then went to class. I was having trouble with calculus and needed a session with the teaching machines. Our machines are better than the run-of-the-mill ones used in classrooms Earthside—they’re linked to the Lab computer, which can do two dozen different jobs at once and still fool you into thinking it’s as smart as a human being, even though the computer is only using a fraction of its capacity.

If you can justify the expense, you can get a big slice of the computer’s capability assigned to you. Then “David”—that’s what the computer techs call it (or rather, him)—sounds like a genius. You can discuss quantum mechanics, economic theory, stellar exploration, or theology with David and he will give solid, well-researched answers as fast as you can read them. (I tried theology; he said God was one of man’s better ideas.) He’s a gift from heaven when you’re doing a term paper. On the other hand, David has a weak personality and never makes a joke. Machines do have their limitations. But one of these days some engineer will give David a sense of humor and overnight he’ll become a television personality. Until then, though, I find him a bit dull.

I spent two hours with David, wading knee-deep through calculus exercises. David pounds away at a point until you feel as though you’ve been sandbagged. Then, just when you’re sure you are a mental defective, you understand—usually because David has finally found the way to present an idea so that it fits your particular bias.

David isn’t just a storage bank for a lot of information. He is a psychologist, a judge, and a coach; just like a human teacher, only many times faster.

This time he gave me a real workout. I left the booth feeling groggy. Zak was outside, looking the other way down a corridor.

“Directing traffic?” I said.

“No, just wondering why Yuri beat it.”

“He was out here?”

“Until a second ago, yes. I was going to ask him something and he ducked away.”

“That was just when I came out?”

“I guess so. What’s up?”

“Let’s go have some coffee. I’ll bring you up to date.”

After I had told him Zak whistled and rocked back in his chair. “A clever boy, that Yuri. No mouth breather, he. Who would have suspected he was such a snake?”

“You. Me.”

“We were prejudiced from the start. The question of the hour is, now that you are in the soup, how do we get you out?”

“My father will talk to the Commander.”

“And our good Commander, with contradicting testimony and all the evidence on one side—”

“Will believe Yuri’s story.”

“True. The man has his limitations.”

“I’m going to forget the whole thing.” I shrugged. “Yuri has me boxed in.”

“The Bohles I know doesn’t give up.”

“The Bohles you know is no fool, either. Commander Aarons can’t do anything, officially, without evidence. His hands are tied. There’s no use in my whining to him about it.”

“A point, a definite point.”

Then I told Zak what Dad had said about Yuri’s father. I expected him to react immediately; instead, he sat and pondered, eyes narrowed, for a long moment.

“You realize the implications, of course?” he said.

“Such as—?”

“Yuri’s father heard a cutback is coming. He guessed—or learned—that only one or two of us kids would stay. Then he told Yuri—”

“—who put two and two together—”

“—and got the square root of sixteen, after double-checking it with the computer. He figured you were prime competition, Matt. So he set out to be conspicuous—good at chess, a winner in squash, a hard worker for Atmospheric Studies, helping with the Walker on Ganymede.”

“And he got me so frapping mad I took a risk on Ganymede. Then he took credit for it, and threw mud all over me in Commander Aarons’ eyes. Damn!”

“Neat. Very, very neat. The hell of it is, you’ve got no comeback.”

“I suppose not.” I sighed. “I’d rather not think about it anyway, not right now. This little scramble is pretty small stuff compared to Ishi.”

Zak’s face clouded over. “Yeah.” He hunched over the rec room table. Neither of us said anything. Zak spilled some of his coffee and instead of sponging it up he stared down at it, distracted. He poked a finger into the brown stain and began tracing a watery design on the smooth, shiny surface. I felt like hell.

“Look, I think I’ll go put in some time in Monitoring,” I said, getting up. “My watch comes up in an hour and I might as well try being early once, just as an experiment. Take—”

“Matt Bohles?” A secretary from down the hall stuck his head in the door.

“Yes?”

“There is a call for you. You can take it on the student recreation center telephone.”

“Oh, okay.” I hoisted aboard my notes, waved to Zak and jogged down the hall. The corridor curved up, giving the familiar illusion that I was running uphill. In a sense I was, because trotting in this direction I was moving counter to the Can’s rotation, which is harder than going the opposite way. For short distances the effect is unnoticeable; only when you’re going nearly halfway around the rim of the Can does it pay to stop and think about the fastest way to travel. But today I had other things to think about.

I found the rec center phone and picked it up.

“Matt?” my father’s voice said.

“What’s up? I was headed toward Monitoring—”

“Never mind that. I have been speaking to Commander Aarons. He wishes to talk to you. In his office.”

When I got there Jenny was seated quietly on a couch. That surprised me more than anything else; what could she be doing here?

Dad was sitting in a chair, holding a sheaf of papers. The Commander looked up when I came in, said hello and motioned me to a popout seat.

“Your father brought to my attention a somewhat different version of the events on Ganymede,” Commander Aarons said, leaning forward and resting his folded hands on his desk top. “I do not mind saying that I am in something of a quandary. I must take a judicial position, since there exists conflicting testimony. At the same time there is no way to determine the truth; there were no other witnesses.”

He stopped and grimaced. The movement tilted his moustache at an angle and gave him a red nose. “Therefore, young Mister Bohles, I shall drop the matter. No action will be taken. Both your and Yuri Sagdaeff’s stories are now known to me; I may or may not consider them in future evaluations of your performance.”

The Commander stopped and let out a breath. “And that is that.” He reached out and flipped off a switch set into the top of his desk. “That’s the official recording for ship’s log. As far as regulations go the matter is now dead.” He looked at me and smiled. “But that is not the reason I had your father call you.”

“Sir?”

“I was wondering if you would be interested in changing jobs. You would work with Miss Fleming, here.”

“Huh? Outside?”

“Operating a shuttle,” my father said, “and making satellite repairs. The job Ishi had.”

Now I understood why Jenny was here. “Who recommended me?”

The Commander tapped a fingernail on the display screen mounted flat into his desk top. I could see some typed entries in what looked like a personnel form. “Your record,” he said. “You know electronics. You have maneuvered one-man shuttlecraft into parking stations.”

“And you have good no-g reflexes,” Dad said.

“I see.” I still didn’t like the idea of getting a job because Jenny put my name in. “But why so soon? Ishi’s job wasn’t all that urgent. Why do you need a replacement right away?”

“The storms,” Jenny said.

I looked over at her. It was the first sound she had made since I came in the room.

“Correct,” my father said. “They are coming more often now and they are more intense. The entire upper atmosphere of Jupiter, particularly near the poles, seems to be in turmoil. The satellites keep track of this; if they fail we’re left with nothing.”

“One is broadcasting intermittently right now,” Jenny said.

“And we must have one person on duty to repair them at all times,” Commander Aarons said.

I thought for a moment. Sure, it was dangerous. So was breathing, if you did it long enough. And Ishi hadn’t been afraid.

“Sounds reasonable to me,” I said. I’ll be glad to switch over from Monitoring, if you need me.”

“Ah. Good.” Commander Aarons stood up. “Best of luck.” He shook my hand. It gave me a warm friendly feeling.

When we were out of the office and Dad had gone back to Monitoring I turned to Jenny and said, “Was this your idea?”

“Mine? Don’t be silly. Commander Aarons called me in just a few minutes before you. He wanted to know if I would mind working with you.”

“Okay. Sorry. I guess I’m just a little edgy today. The last twenty-four hours hasn’t done me a whole lot of good.”

Jenny looked sad. “I know what you mean.”

We walked down to the student rec center to get something to eat. We had to stand in line.

“I think we ought to go down to the main bay and begin going over your shuttle,” Jenny said.

“Huh?”

“Well, you’re going to have to learn how to operate it sometime. I know you’ve done some simple piloting, but—”

“You mean you’re supposed to teach me?”

“Who else?”

“Well…”

“Say, is there some reason you don’t want to work with me?”

“Uh, no,” I lied.

In the back of my mind I was thinking about Zak’s theory about what living so close together in the Can had done to us. It felt right. Jenny was like the rest of the girls I knew. Buddies, I guess you’d say. I could see she was pretty and smart and reliable, sure. And I’d been thinking of her that way for as long as I could remember. But now I wanted something else.

Something had started me thinking. Maybe it had been Zak and his comical Rebecca and Isaac, lurching around and pounding away at each other. I felt like a dummy, a goody-goody boy stuck out here around Jupiter, while back on Earth a guy my age knew about women and how to treat them. Well, that was going to change. But until I could figure out how to do that, I didn’t want to be all palsy with Jenny. Not when I could maybe be something more…

“Hey, are you paying attention?” she said.

“Huh? Oh yeah. Look, let’s get this training over with, huh?”

She looked at me curiously. “You seem a little nervous about something, Matt.”

“Naw, I’m okay.”

“You sure?”

“Sure I’m sure.”

Jenny shrugged.

“It could not be because you are afraid, of course,” a deep voice said.

I turned Yuri had filled in the line behind us.

“Get away, Sagdaeff,” I said.

“Don’t be silly, Yuri.” Jenny said. “Matt isn’t afraid.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that. He did not react very well under stress on Ganymede.”

“How would you like a flat nose?” I said.

“Ah ha, threatening violence. The last resort of the incompetent. I wonder what Commander Aarons would think if you were to hit me in public?”

“Let’s find out,” I said, raising my arms.

“Yuri! Matt! Stop it. Yuri, go away. You started it.”

“I merely came over to congratulate Matt on his new position.”

“How did you know?” I said.

“Rumors, rumors. And I happened to be talking to the Commander’s secretary when she was typing up the change of status report.” Yuri smiled coldly at me.

Jenny said, “Yuri…”

“All right. I am leaving.” He walked away.

“What was that all about?” Jenny said. “Did it have anything to do with what Commander Aarons said?”

So I told her about Ganymede and the air hose. It was already getting to be an old story.

“I see,” Jenny said, thoughtfully chewing a sandwich. (By this time we had been through the line.) “That explains a lot of Yuri’s behavior.”

“It does?”

“Of course. Look.” she said, tossing her head to get some brown curls out of her eyes, “it must have been a hard thing for Yuri to have to admit to himself that he made a big mistake with the air hose. It hurt him.”

“Hurt his ego, you mean. It makes a big target.”

“All right, it damaged his self-image. He is miffed. And he’s taking it out on you.”

“Why me? I saved him.”

“You saw him make the mistake, too.”

“This sounds pretty twisted to me.”

“Maybe it is, but something must be making him act this way,”

“Let’s make a deal.” I said, patting her hand. “You don’t psychoanalyze me and I promise not to run berserk. Okay?” I decided not to go into Zak’s theory about Yuri, even though I was sure it was true. What could be gained?

“I didn’t know you were about to.”

“Well, I might if people keep giving me advice. Come on, let’s get to work. Is the Ballerina ready?”

She got up, straightening her red blouse, and said, “Yes, but that’s not the shuttle we’ll be using to train you.”

“Oh? Ishi’s then. What’s its name?”

“He never gave it one.” she said as we left the cafeteria. “It was entered in the log by its inventory number.”

“I’ll name it myself, then.”

“What?”

“Roadhog,” I said.

We suited up and cycled through the Can’s main lock. The vehicle bay is just outside the lock, but the bay isn’t a particular room you can point at—it’s simply the big open space in the hollow part of the Can. All the small-sized vehicles are kept there and secured at the axis with a network of elastic tie-lines, to be sure they don’t bang into each other. All along the inner face of the Can are slots for berthing; when a vehicle needs to be fueled or worked over, it’s pulled into a berth. Otherwise it’s moored a good distance from the Can’s skin, in high vacuum that does it no harm.

Jenny and I clipped on to the mooring lines and pushed off. After a moment of coasting I turned so my feet pointed toward the shuttle and squirted my attitude jets. That slowed me to a crawl and I unclipped from the line just as the shuttle swelled up to block my view of the opposite inner wall of the Can. I landed, catlike.

I swung around, found a pipe and attached my own suit tie-line to it. The shuttles are all different: each one was thrown together with whatever spare parts came to hand. The Roadhog—I’d silently christened it the moment my glove touched the pipe—looked like a conglomerate of castoffs until you studied the structure.

It was a bit like an automobile chassis, all bones and no skin. The pilot was belted into a couch at the center. He was surrounded by pipes and struts and fuel tanks, without having his view obscured. A small yellow ion-engine was mounted behind him. The whole thing was lumpy but balanced; spacecraft have to be stable.

I glided over to the pilot’s couch and perched on top of the backrest. Around us, never closer than twenty yards, were other craft. A few had their running lights on; they were being checked over or preparing to go out. A big tube-shaped cargo hauler was moored right above us. Beyond that the gray water-shield plugged the bore of the Can. Below I could see someone using a cutting torch, its flame a sharp, fierce blue diamond.

I heard a faint clank as Jenny bumped into the shuttle. She secured her suit safety line and came swarming over to me.

She touched helmets. “You know how to use the air tanks on this one, don’t you?”

“Sure.”

“Take us over there, then,” she said, pointing to Berth H.

I buckled myself into the pilot couch and reached out gingerly for the controls. You don’t use an ion engine inside the Can’s bay, or even nearby if you can help it. The backwash can knock a man head over heels a hundred meters away, or snarl mooring lines. So I gently thumbed in the override on the shuttle’s air tanks, switched them over to the pipe system that led to the little maneuvering jets at the rear, and reached for the release button.

“Forgotten anything?” Jenny said lightly.

“Huh?”

“Our mooring lines.”

“Oh.” I felt my face go red. I unbuckled and glided around the four corners of the Roadhog, unhooking the elastic lines. They’re on retrieval coils, so as soon as I let go a line it retracted toward the axis.

I sat back down in the couch. “All cleared. Captain.”

She didn’t say anything. I carefully bled a little air into the pipes and felt a satisfying tug as we got under way. I gave us little bursts of air to maneuver around the cargo hauler overhead and cut in the gyros to keep us from tumbling.

We inched our way across the bay. I got back into the practice of looking in three different directions at once; my neck started to ache. Human beings are built for navigating in two dimensions; our eyes are set in a line parallel to the ground, suitable for chasing wildebeests. Outer space takes some getting used to. Even after you’ve trained your stomach to stop pushing the panic button when you’re in no-g conditions, you have to keep reminding yourself that up and down are just as important as sideways. The adjustment is never perfect, because you’re trying to learn a set of reflexes your body just wasn’t programmed to take. That’s why no-g maneuvering takes a lot of energy—you’re fighting yourself all the way, whether you know it or not. I suppose that’s why kids like me are a little better at no-g work and don’t tire so fast; our reflexes aren’t totally “set” yet.

Berth H was a square-mouthed tube with bright lights lining the inside. I edged the Roadhog into the slot and brought us to a stop nearly perfectly; we couldn’t have been moving faster than a meter per second when we bumped into the buffer pads at the end.

Jenny patted me on the shoulder and bounded away to fasten mooring lines.

I felt good. I had proved that I could still handle a shuttlecraft, despite being out of practice. And most of all, I was out in space again. It had been too long.

That was the high point. The next five hours were something less than gratifying. Jenny took me over the Roadhog inch by inch, making me learn every valve and meter and strut on the contraption. I had forgotten a lot; the rest I hadn’t learned at all.

She made me draw a flowchart for the air pipes, after letting me inspect the Roadhog for five minutes. I thought I’d figured it out. When she handed the clipboard back to me, covered with red marks. I found out that I had gotten everything exactly backwards.

I checked out the works: ring laser gyros, radio, first aid, fuel feeds, hauling collars, repair kit. spare parts, search lights, electrical system, navigation, backup systems, vector integrator—you name it, I had to find it, see if it worked, explain how I would repair it if it didn’t, and relate it to all the other systems it meshed with.

“Do you think you’re familiar with these things now?” Jenny said.

“I’m surprised you don’t have me kiss each one individually,” I said. She grinned at me. I grinned back; a lock of hair had curled down between her eyes—she couldn’t reach it, of course, in a space suit—and I wondered why I hadn’t realized before how pretty she was.

My old romanticism again. The people I respected most were the ones who could do things. Most girls didn’t fit in that category, and I—ambitious Matt Bohles—looked down my nose at them. What good is a girl who is just an ornament?

For some reason I had included Jenny in that group, too. These last few hours had proven me wrong. I was intrigued. Jenny was something special.

“Do you feel ready to take her out?” Jenny said. I blinked; I had been staring at her moodily, thinking, for the last minute.

“The Roadhog is not a her, it’s a him.” I said.

“Ships are always feminine,” she said. “There are female roadhogs, too. So what’s your answer?”

“Alone?”

“Of course not. I’ll be holding your hot little hand all the way.” She looked at her watch. “The round trip should take about thirteen hours. It’s too late to leave today.”

“What’s the trip for?”

“Satellite Fourteen. A circuit component is on the fritz and the Faraday cup doesn’t give reasonable readings.”

I shrugged and then remembered that in a suit the gesture was invisible. “Fine. Tomorrow morning, then, huh?”