Jupiter Project

Chapter 11

I got up early the next day and beat Jenny down to the vehicle bay. I fooled around, poking my nose into some other ships moored nearby, until I got a call over suit radio. I turned and saw her kicking off from the lock.

“My Captain cometh,” I said.

“Not me, kid. You’re in charge on this one.”

“What about Roadhog? Is she fueled? He, I mean.”

“Don’t fight it. The Roadhog is a she. And of course she’s fueled. I’m not sloppy at maintenance.”

We coasted into Berth G, freed the lines, and Jenny gracefully swung into the pilot’s couch. She called in to the bridge and had an updated flight plan transmitted to the shuttle computer’s memory. Then I took over. I ran quickly through the standard checklist. Jenny sat on the flat bench next to the couch, buckled herself in and gave me the high sign.

I backed us cautiously out of the berth and brought the nose up to a point at the “top” of the Can. We still carried the angular velocity of the Can, so I gave the lateral jets a burst. We backed away from the Can’s inner wall. The Can appeared to spin faster and faster and I thumbed in more side thrust.

I gave Roadhog one burst of LOX through the rear jets and we coasted for the top of the Can in one long, clean line. We glided by the shadowy shapes of parked craft, safety neons splashing pools of light over them. The Can pinwheeled about us. Viewports passed, glowing softly. In one a woman looked up at her skylight and saw us. She waved. Jenny waved back. The interior of the Can, with its soft yellow glow, already seemed far away.

We passed the Sagan. Thick hoses sprouted from her water tanks and snaked into sockets on the Can’s axis. Above, the pancake sac of water reflected Jove’s amber light on its mottled plastic skin. As we reached the top of the Can I bled out a stream of air from the decelerating jets and we came to a halt.

The water shields are held by a few mooring lines, stationary above the Can itself. There’s about fifty meters clearance between the Can top and the pancake, enough for us to slip out. The shields are only moved to let out a big cruiser ship like the Sagan; otherwise they sit there, blocking high energy electrons. I turned us so we pointed out, between the Can and the gray water-shield. Jupiter peeked over the rim as we cleared the top of the Can. It was a crescent; the Can was moving sunward in its orbit.

The shuttle shifted and murmured under me. The computer program was taking over. I punched the release button on the small control board and instantly felt a slight thrust. The ion engine had cut in. It made no noise; it’s a low-impulse system.

We went straight up, away from the Lab, as though the Can was a cannon and we had been shot out of it. I was looking at Jupiter through the spaces in the Roadhog’s floor.

“Hey,” I said, “we’re heading due north.”

“Most observant. We’re going into a polar orbit.”

“Satellite Fourteen is in a polar orbit?”

“Nearly. Monitoring and Astrophysics are making it pretty popular. Satellite Fourteen is in an eccentric orbit that takes it in close to Jupiter’s poles.”

“So it gets the best data on the storms?”

“That’s what I hear. I just fix ’em, I don’t try to understand ’em. Look, you can see the storms now.”

I followed her pointing finger. Near the north pole of Jupiter the bands broke and eddied and lost some of their bright orange color. I could make out tiny whirlpools that churned up the edges of the bands.

“Is a storm brewing?” I said.

“No, we’re seeing the last gasp of one that peaked five days ago. Astrophysics said they didn’t think another would come along for a while yet. but that’s only a guess.”

“What’s the radiation level like during the storm?”

“High. Higher than they’ve ever seen before, Astrophysics says. Why, worried?”

“Yup. I’m too young to be broiled in an electron shower. Are the shielding fields on?” I looked at my control panel. Everything glowed green.

“Yes, they went on automatically when we left the Lab. Don’t worry.”

“Don’t mind me. I’m a natural worrier,” I looked around at the superconducting bars that ring the Roadhog, though of course you can’t see the magnetic fields they produce. Those bars were all that kept Jupiter’s Van Allen belts from frying us alive.

Radiation is a subtle thing. You can’t see it or taste it, but those little electrons and protons can fry you in an hour. They are why the Lab wasn’t orbited in close to Jupiter.

Earth and Jupiter have one big thing in common: radiation belts. A man named Van Allen discovered them back in the early Space Age, around Earth. A little later Jupiter turned out to have them, too. Mars doesn’t, nor Venus, nor Mercury. Reason: no magnetic fields. Earth and Jupiter generate big magnetic fields around them, and those fields trap high-energy particles that the Sun throws out.

They’re called belts because that’s what they look like—big doughnuts around Jupiter and Earth, many planetary radii in diameter. The Lab had to be located out beyond the worst part of that doughnut or we’d be cooked with radiation. Even so, the Lab has water tanks that line the outside of the Can and stop incoming particles before they can reach the living quarters.

The Roadhog hasn’t got that mass. It’s a shuttle, engineered for speed and economy. So you don’t go out in it during radiation storms.

Extra mass might have stopped the pellet that killed Ishi. Maybe there was an argument for putting shielding around the shuttles. Magnetic fields don’t affect pieces of rock, because the rock is electrically neutral; only encasing a shuttle in heavy walls would make it really safe.

But I wasn’t planning on applying for an insurance policy, anyway. I stopped brooding about Ishi and turned to Jenny.

“What’s wrong with Satellite Fourteen, anyway?”

“Here.” she said, handing me a clipboard with a maze of circuit diagrams on it. “A problem for the student.”

I found the circuit component that was fouling up pretty fast. The tough part was the Faraday cup.

The cup on most satellites, including Fourteen, is a simple affair. It has an electrostatically-charged grid open to the space around the satellite. Any charged particle that wanders by can be attracted by the grid. When it is, it picks up some added velocity and overshoots the grid—goes right through it—and runs smack into a collector. The process builds up a voltage across a capacitor. Every so often a watch officer in Monitoring—somebody like me—will call for a count from the satellite. The capacitor will be discharged, the voltage measured, and a little arithmetic gives the number of particles (usually electrons) the cup captured.

Satellite Fourteen’s cup wasn’t working. I had my own idea why. I didn’t think they were well designed.

“Hey, look,” Jenny said. I looked down, through the Roadhog’s floor. A brownish whirlpool, thick with blotches of red, was churning in the clouds below.

“That one reminds me of the Red Spot,” I said.

“I’ve never seen anything like it before. Odd color.”

“There are some funny things going on in that atmosphere. Old Jove is putting on a show for us.”

“I wonder why.”

“Come back in ten years. Maybe we’ll know then.”

The nice thing about having somebody along on a trip is the reassurance you get. It’s easy, out in space, to get swallowed up in the vastness of everything. Being able to talk to somebody brings things back into perspective.

So we chattered away. I’d never spent that much time alone with Jenny, and I found out a lot of things about her I didn’t know. What I saw, I liked.

That’s the way it went, for six hours. Yes, six. Jupiter is big. The Roadhog pushed steadily at our backs and took us upward, toward the north pole, so we could match orbits with Satellite Fourteen.

We spotted a tiny glimmering dot on our left while the Roadhog was making final adjustments with its maneuvering jets. It grew rapidly: a silvery ball sprouting antennas and small attitude jets. It was one of the older satellites, which probably explained why it failed.

Jenny stayed in the shuttle while I coasted across to the satellite. It was basketball-sized, its shiny skin pitted. I pulled out several shelves of circuitry, disconnected the Faraday cup and went back to Jenny.

We both looked over the parts and discussed what to do about them. That’s the advantage of sending out a human being, rather than relying on multiple backup systems—the space around Jupiter is unknown, and no engineer back on Earth can predict what will happen to his pet gadget after a few years of pounding from high-energy electrons, dust and micrometeorites. In jargonese they call it “failure to allow for contingencies.”

We made some repairs on the circuitry. Working in gloves is awkward and even slipping microchip decks snugly into place can be difficult. We both had modified our suits for the work. We had a big flap on the chest that pulled down, revealing a big adhesive patch. Pull the flap down, stick the securing tab on a knee, and there you have half a square meter of microhooks. They’ll hang onto anything until you give it a good tug. If you’ve ever chased a lost thermocouple over a cubic klick of space, because you let go of it for a nanosecond or two, you’d appreciate an adhesive patch. Some techs have them on their arms, legs, every place they can see and reach.

After the standard repairs, I looked at the cup. It was a mess. Intermittent shorts, crappy signal characteristics. I didn’t think much of the design, either. Looked like ancient history. “Maybe we should keep it as it is,” I suggested. “For a museum piece.” Under Jenny’s schoolmarm eye I took it out, worked the replacement in, checked connections, and then ran a few tests on the rest of the oversized silver basketball. Everything looked okay. I coasted back.

“Not bad,” Jenny said. “You only took fifty-three minutes.”

On the long arc back we ate some squeeze-soup and tried to relax. I was tired. There is a kind of tension that comes from carrying out delicate operations in zero-g. Your muscles do far more than is necessary, without your even knowing it. Only later do you feel the aches seep into your joints.

Satellite Fourteen was one of the three satellites that looped in close over the pole, to get readings where the magnetic fields are strongest. We got a good view of the Great White Oval, a mixmaster of colors inside a glaring white swirl. As we watched it Jenny and I started to talk. The grand dance of Jove went on beneath, so vivid and alive you felt as if you could reach out and touch it. Somebody had called it “the greatest found art object in the solar system,” back in the twentieth century. Dead right. God’s palette. And as we stared at the hypnotic technicolor swirl, Jenny and I began to talk, really talk. And what came out was a lot of the things I’d always thought but never said.

I told her about the way the whole social thing looks to me—and to a lot of boys growing up. We’re driven by a big urge—get laid! the hormones sing. But everybody says, no, you’re too young. You’ll get in trouble. You sort of expect your parents and The System to keep saying no—they always do; they’re cautious. So you discount that. But the girls say it, too. That’s because they’ve been sold a bill of goods, just like us. They have everybody wagging fingers at them, saying Watch out! Don’t give in. Don’t even think of giving in. You’re not ready for it, emotionally ready. And you could get pregnant. And they’re right, in a way. Girls pay the bigger price. Their whole growing-up process is filled with fears of things that might happen to them. Boys never have to worry about getting pregnant. Or raped. And suppose you’re a thirteen-year-old girl and you decide you’re going to have sex no matter what anybody says? If you do anything to prevent pregnancy, you’re in trouble. The doctor tells your parents and then they come down on you. And if you don’t see the doctor, then maybe you wind up having a baby or getting an abortion. Some choice, uh?

I could see all that. Girls had it hard. Maybe harder than we did. Or maybe the trouble was just different. Boys had this drive and it seemed powerful as hell. You thought about it all the time.

Jenny said, well, sure, she thought about sex; but not all the time. Maybe for boys it was different. For girls, sex was an expression of something else a lot of the time. Of affection. Or of a sense of self-esteem (I’m a woman; somebody wants me). Or sometimes as a reward to the boy for something. And a girl sees images of women all over the place while she’s growing up—magazines, 3D ads. And they’re all actresses’ pinups, beautifully groomed and busty and leggy. “Most girls get a kind of inferiority complex out of all that,” Jenny said. “So sex gets to be a thing you’re kind of shy of, because compared to those gorgeous women on 3D, you’re not so much. How could any man desire you?”

There were two reactions to this, she murmured, making a sour expression. A girl could go out and try to prove herself—and run all the risks I had been talking about. Or she could just hang back, shy. Neither solution really worked. It just delayed the real problem, which was coming to grips with your own personality, who you really were.

Maybe so, I said, but it seemed to me we all got wounded. After a while of frustration, a guy got to seeing girls as the enemy. They were the ones doing the rejecting, the ones who were holding out. They could come across if they wanted to. So a guy builds up this resentment of women, and he keeps it. Even after he’s got things sort of straightened out, there are always those years when he was a teenager and every hand was turned against what his body told him to do. Walking wounded, yeah. A guy doesn’t forget.

Jenny said softly, “I think I see what you mean. The training we get from our parents and others—it makes us think the other sex is different, an enemy. Sure, maybe they don’t intend it to have that effect. But it does.”

“Right.”

“We’re all victims, then.”

“Yeah. I can understand how things got this way…”

“Especially out here in the Can.”

“Right. But that doesn’t mean I have to like it.”

She nodded solemnly and looked at me. “I don’t either.”

The talk sort of dribbled off. We started to get tired. We buckled in and got some hours of zero-g sleep.

When the bridge of the Can called. I woke up. I felt pretty well rested. The Can was already a glowing dot, spinning patiently.

I jockeyed Roadhog into the bay and we both did the refueling; it was beginning to look like we would make a good team. Most shuttle hops weren’t so long and one operator would do, but on jobs like this one the bridge liked two pilots along.

I felt good. It seemed like something to celebrate, so I invited Jenny for a drink—a real one, not a milkshake.

I unsuited, went through the ’fresher—ever smell someone who’s been working in a space suit for over thirteen hours?—and waited for Jenny in the tube outside the women’s area. I had planned on taking her to the small officer’s bar on one of the outer levels, where a big 3D screen gives views of Earth and I thought we wouldn’t meet anyone we knew. It was 20:00 hours, ship’s time, well past the cocktail hour.

I had just leaned against the wall when Zak came loping along, panting.

“I figured you’d be here,” he gasped. “Want—wanted to catch you.”

“What for?”

“Commander Aarons called a shipwide meeting, it’s starting right now. I thought you’d probably missed the announcement while you were coming inside.”

Jenny appeared. “What announcement? What is it?”

“Come on,” Zak said.

“I think we ought to go,” I said apologetically. Jenny and I looked at each other. We shrugged. “A little later, maybe…”

Jenny smiled and nodded. We followed Zak, who was already walking away. I felt bad about interrupting our little private party. Alcohol holds no fascination for me—I’ve had plenty of chances to drink at home, so it’s nothing new—but there is something about the rituals of drinking that can cement new ties, formalize a relationship. And I suppose I wanted to mark the occasion. I wanted to make a bench mark that said, here is when I opened my eyes a little, and saw her clearly for the first time.

Zak told us about a flurry of rumors that had run around the Lab during the day, most of them contradictory. I half-listened on the way to the auditorium. The bowl was nearly filled. The 3D cameras were operating, so that people who couldn’t leave their posts could listen in. We found three seats together on the very last row.

The auditorium buzzed with speculation. I spotted Mom and Dad sitting together, the Motos, and several others. The lights dimmed slightly. People stopped chattering and Commander Aarons walked to the podium at center stage. He seemed smaller than I remembered him, and awfully tired. He reached up and nervously plucked at his moustache before speaking.

“It is my duty to make a grave announcement. Two hours ago I received word from the Executive Council of the International Space Administration. For the last several weeks the Council has deliberated on the future course of research and exploration throughout the solar system.

“The discussions were extensive. Plans for construction of the first unmanned probes to the nearby stars were even considered; the Council elected to set aside such a program for the foreseeable future.

“As many of you may have suspected, it was an order of the Council that delayed the departure of the Argosy. I did not know why until this evening.

“We are all aware—however divorced we may be from our home planet—that the economic crisis there is steadily worsening. Overpopulation has not been solved. Raw materials are running low, despite the self-supporting mines in the asteroid belt. Gradually the ‘extras’ are being whittled away.

“I am afraid the Council has decided that it is the Laboratory’s turn to be trimmed. No, no—” he looked toward the top of the bowl, directly at me—“that is far too mild a word. The Council has informed me…that all research operations here and on Ganymede are to be ended. The Laboratory is finished.”