Jupiter Project

Chapter 12

Suddenly everybody was talking at once. The Commander let the noise build for a moment and then cut it off by raising his hand.

“The Argosy will leave Earth orbit within the hour. It is flying empty; none of the cargo we asked for is aboard, nor are food supplements. The Council has given orders that the Laboratory be stripped of useful scientific instruments. All personnel are to return to Earth on the Argosy.”

“Impossible!” someone down front shouted.

The Commander shook his head. “It is not. The Council sent detailed plans for departure. If we squeeze, we can make it.”

“But why? Why so sudden?” the same person said again.

Commander Aarons relaxed his stance and leaned slightly against the podium. He seemed glad that the formal announcement was over and he could talk normally. “We’ve always known that there are factions on the Council who oppose space research further away than Luna. I believe since the recent elections they are in the driver’s seat.”

Mr. Jablons stood up. “Commander, we have as much patience as anyone. We all know ISA has been trying to nickel and dime us to death for years, with little cuts here and there. But this isn’t a cut, it’s a hangman’s noose. I say we should fight it!”

“Right!”

“I’m with Jablons!”

“Very fine, gentlemen,” the Commander said. “What do you propose?”

“Shoot the Council!”

Commander Aarons smiled wryly. “Impractical, I am afraid. Anyone else?”

Mrs. Moto stood up. “We are citizens of many different countries. Could we not appeal through our geographical representatives?”

“We are only a few more than twelve hundred people. Madam.” Commander Aarons said. “We carry very little political clout.”

“Senator Davidson has always supported the Lab. We can appeal to him,” a voice said.

A man stood and waved for attention from the Commander. When he got it he said. “Judging from a few hints in the legislative reports we get sandwiched into the news from Earth, Senator Davidson fought for us and lost. He has relinquished his position on the Advisory Board.” The Commander nodded. “Anyway, a senator is a creature half-man and half-horse. Normally the top half is a man. You can’t expect them to set sail against the prevailing winds.”

Some people nodded; others looked glum.

A woman stood. “Yes, Mrs. Schloffski?” the Commander said and I recognized her from the Sagan.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” she said dramatically, “I have been sorely distressed at the things said here tonight. Murder and insurrection have been advocated. I think it is time the saner, wiser heads in this Laboratory are heeded—goodness knows we have not been listened to enough in the past. In all honesty, I feel that if the Commander and his staff had sought out proper council among the Laboratory members we would not be having such difficulties now. I have always thought—”

“Do you have a point, Mrs. Schloffski?” Commander Aarons said mildly.

“Of course I do. I wanted to say that, once the Council has spoken, we should all be good enough citizens to recognize that fact and act accordingly. Certainly there is no one else to blame than ourselves for the fact that we have found so little of lasting scientific interest out here—”

“Who says?”

“How would you know?”

“—far from our natural home.” She glared at the hecklers. “I believe there are a number of women who followed their husbands out from Earth and feel that they have sacrificed enough. The living conditions here are wretched. I imagine there will be many of us who will be glad to go home.”

Mrs. Schloffski sat down. Her husband, sitting next to her, said something. She snapped at him and he opened his mouth and then closed it again. After that he was quiet.

“Commander?” my mother said, standing. “I would like to speak for the women I know. We are not ready to go Earthside until our jobs are finished here. We will stand by our husbands even if we don’t have clean, ironed sheets every day.”

There was a burst of applause. Several hands were waving for attention. The Commander picked my father’s.

“Something bothers me about your wording, Commander. You said everyone returns on the Argosy?”

“Correct.”

“I don’t believe the Can’s fusion plant and electrical generators can be left to automatic control; it’s too risky. We will have to shut them down before we go.”

“What’s your point?” someone in the audience said.

“Without current our superconducting magnets will not work.”

There was a murmur as a few people saw what Dad was driving at. Commander Aarons frowned and unconsciously tugged at his moustache.

“Without the magnets,” my father went on, “the Can won’t be completely shielded from the Van Allen belt radiation. High-energy electrons and protons will pass into the Laboratory. Within a year they will create enough radioactive isotopes to make the living quarters here uninhabitable. The isotopes will be distributed randomly around the Lab, in the walls and deck. The Lab will be unlivable.”

The crowd was silent for a moment. An engineer said, “You mean men couldn’t come back, ever? The Can would be contaminated?”

“It looks that way.”

“Doctor Yakana is in charge of radiation control. Doctor, do you agree with Dr. Bohles?”

A lanky man near the front nodded.

“Those Earthside flea-brains!” someone shouted.

“Commander!” one of the ship’s officers said. “Did the Council say they were abandoning the Lab?”

Aarons sighed. “My orders say ‘The facility will be reactivated when fiscal policy permits.’ That’s all.”

“When they speak in Latin it’s always a brush-off,” Zak said to me. The crowd was muttering, restless.

A ship’s officer stood up. He was Lt. Sharma, a heavy, dark man from Calcutta who ranked middle-high on the squash roster.

“Sir, I think most of us have had enough of ISA,” he said. “Right?” He turned to the audience and they answered with a storm of clapping.

“There’s one thing the Council forgot. We don’t have to cooperate! They can’t force us. Who is going to send armed men all the way out to Jupiter?”

“I say we stay!” another voice said. “Refuse to board the Argosy. We’ll thumb our noses at ’em.”

Lt. Sharma shook his head. “Lord preserve me from my friends. That isn’t what I meant. Not all of us can live out here indefinitely—we need trace elements in our diet, spare parts for the life system and a hundred other things.”

“Okay, how long can we stick it out?” someone said.

“I am not qualified to say,” Commander Aarons said. “You three”—he pointed out two bridge officers and the supervisor of Maintenance Division—“put your heads together and give us a guess.”

The three women met in an aisle and murmured together for a moment while everybody watched. They nodded. “A little less than two years before we have serious trouble,” one of them said.

“Thank you. I am no politician or economist, but I do not believe Earth’s troubles will clear up in two years. The Council will not be able to send more ships by that time. And if we rebel now I know they’re not going to be in the mood, anyway.”

Lt. Sharma looked exasperated. “Sir, that is not what I had in mind.”

“Oh?”

“Most of the Can’s population must return Earthside. We’ll never survive, otherwise. But we don’t have to leave the project deserted. Leave behind a skeleton crew to keep the superconductors working, so that someday men can come back.”

Mr. Moto stood up. “That sounds fine to me. We should leave a few scientists, too, to keep watch on Jupiter. Even simple, close-up observations covering the time the rest of us are gone will be immensely important.”

“I volunteer,” Mr. Jablons said.

“Me, too!”

“Single personnel should have preference.”

“That’s unfair!”

“Merde!”

“You can’t—”

“Ich muss—”

“Quiet!” Commander Aarons tugged at his moustache. “All that will be decided later.” He gazed slowly around the bowl. “I think we are all far too disturbed and hot under the collar to make reasonable judgments right now. I urge you all to think this matter through carefully; your lives may depend on it.

“I ask you then to go home and discuss it among your families. In a few days we will meet again. Good evening.”

There was a burst of applause as he left the podium.

Jenny and Zak and I got out ahead of the crowd and headed for my home. People were pretty stunned. It wasn’t until some time later that I remembered my date with Jenny; both of us had forgotten it.

“What do you think our chances are of staying on?” she asked me.

“Pretty grim. You can be sure any skeleton crew won’t include us.”

“Why has it got to be so few people?” Zak said. “We could cut out a lot of things, like the Ganymede base—”

“And have us climbing the walls and getting claustrophobic?” Jenny said. “No thankee.”

“Well, we could stretch the lifetime of some of our machines by not using them so much. Take your shuttles; don’t send them out so often. Save fuel, too.”

“And if a satellite goes on the blink we just let it sit for a month?” Jenny said, tossing her head to arrange her hair. “What’s the point of staying out here, if we can’t get any research done?”

“I think we ought to abide by what the Commander decides and not put up a squawk.” I said. “Things will be touch and go when the Argosy arrives, as it is.”

“What do you mean?” Jenny said.

“I’m not so sure the Council will expect us to come along meekly. They might have a few soldiers on that ship.”

“Oh,” she said.

“The bridge officers have firearms,” Zak said.

“I know. And shooting off a hand weapon in a spaceship is stupid, but it might happen. One bad shot and everybody on that corridor will be breathing vacuum.”

“You have a better idea?” Zak said.

“Sure,” I grinned. “Hide. A few of us stay behind, hidden—” We were just crossing an intersection of two tubes.

“Typical,” said a familiar voice. “But I didn’t think you would admit it. Bohles.”

Yuri came walking up. “Admit what?” I said.

“To being a coward.” Yuri said. “Going to hide from the Argosy crew? Count on them not missing the skeleton crew that is left behind?”

“That was the idea,” I said sullenly.

“You don’t want to fight it out with them like a man, eh?” He gave me his confident smile. “No, you would rather hide the skeleton crew and act like a coward.” He was playing this out for the benefit of Jenny and Zak. He casually folded his arms and smirked at me.

“Don’t bother him, Yuri.” Jenny said. There was a kind of plaintive note in her voice. As though she were pleading for me.

“No, let him bother me,” I said, and hit Yuri in the mouth.

He looked surprised, then angry. The punch hadn’t hurt him much. I blinked, and saw yellow sunlight, the school yard—

“You little—” he said, lowering his arms. I hit him again, harder. This time he stepped back, under the blow, and caught me solidly across the ribs. Suddenly I felt a cold tremor of naked fear.

That’s where I lost track. I used fists, elbows and even tried butting him with my head, and meanwhile Yuri was slamming his big ham hands into me, staggering me with every punch, making my eyes blur. I knew if I kept on and watched how his balance shifted just before he punched I could avoid most of the damage. And that meant I would win, because absolutely nothing was going to stop me from beating Yuri to a pulp, I told myself. The dust, the jeering, bright sunlight…

Only…my arms were so heavy…

It took them forever to reach out and hit Yuri, and when they did I could feel the shock all the way to my shoulder. I was slowing down, and Yuri was speeding up. I felt the sharp pain of being hit—

Far away a voice said. “Hey! Break it up!” and a hand spun me around.

It was one of the bridge officers, frowning at me. I couldn’t remember his name. My mind was a swirl of fear and self-disgust.

“If you two kids haven’t got anything better to do than brawl, when the Lab is in deep trouble—”

“I’ll take care of it, sir,” Zak said, pulling at my sleeve. Yuri lowered his fists and snorted contemptuously at me. Jenny pushed him away. “Wo—won’t happen again.” I gasped.

Somehow the bridge officer disappeared and I was being led down a corridor, toward home. I stumbled blindly away.

The next morning I could hardly remember what had happened. Mom had patched me up, disinfected a cut over my cheekbone, and gave me a sedative. It must have been more than that: I went out like a light, and woke up with a dull buzzing in my head.

Neither Mom nor Dad mentioned the fight at breakfast. I didn’t either, losers seldom do.

We did talk about the meeting, though. Dad came on rather pontifically about his obligation to his family and the fact that the Council might never send a relief expedition out to the Can’s skeleton crew. It wasn’t beyond ISA to drop the problem, political entanglements and all, and conveniently forget that there were men still circling Jupiter.

So, said Dad, the Bohles family would ship out on the Argosy. I pointed out to him that by the time the Argosy arrived I would be eighteen and technically a free adult.

That didn’t go down very well. Dad frowned and Mom started to get tears in the corners of her eyes.

“After all,” I said, feeling embarrassed, “you can’t be sure ISA won’t return. I’ll come Earthside then.”

Dad sighed. “No, it’s not that.”

“What is it, then?”

“You will be a stranger to us by then, Mattie.” Mom said. “These next few years are the last ones we would ever have together as a family, and now…”

“Leyetta,” Dad said. “Quiet. You can’t shoulder the boy with that. He has to start finding his way alone now.”

“Well, I didn’t mean it quite that way,” I said uncomfortably. “I don’t want to break up the family. You’re all I’ve got. But if I have a chance to stay here…”

“You should take it.” Dad said decisively. “I would’ve done the same at your age.”

“Paul!”

“It’s true. Leyetta. A man has got to go his own way sometime.”

“Don’t worry, Mom.” I searched around for some way to console her. “I probably won’t be picked to stay, anyhow.” But I knew very well that if I got the chance, I’d stick it out here.

“If you do stay, Matt.” Dad said slowly, “be sure you come Earthside when you can. We don’t want to lose track of you altogether.”

“Huh? Why, you’ll both be coming out as soon as ISA gets its head on straight.”

Mom shook her head. “No. Mattie… In a few more years there will be others, just as capable and younger.”

“No!”

“Yes, I’m afraid.” Dad smiled slightly. “But let’s not worry ourselves about that. Maybe there will be a way to weasel around the rules, who knows? The point that bothers me is that we came so close out here, we almost found life, and now it might be decades—hell, centuries!—before men get another crack at it.”

“I don’t see how you can be so sure there is life. Paul.” Mom said. “All I hear about is an endless series of negative results.”

“Atmospheric Studies is going deeper and deeper with those bathyscaphes. If there is anything there—and there must be!—they will find it.”

“Maybe they’ll find something before the Argosy arrives,” I said hopefully. “That would pull our chestnuts out of the fire.”

“True.” Dad sighed. “But some of our working time will be taken up with packing, shutting down the Lab, and compiling all the data we already have.”

“Well, we can try.”

“Of course. But don’t expect miracles.”

My mother said, “Paul, do you think there’s something to this idea of leaving some of us here to keep the Can alive? Honestly?”

“Ummmm. Well, maybe.”

My mother curled one side of her mouth down, looking the way she sometimes does when she’s thinking out a decision. “Well,” she finally said, “in that case… I’m going to volunteer, too.”

“You, Leyetta?”

“Mom, why?”

She looked steadily at us. “When I made that little speech last night, did you think I was talking like some kind of housewife? I must admit I sounded that way to myself. I was just trying to oppose that Mrs. Schloffski. But I came out here for reasons of my own, remember—not just to follow your father, Matt.”

This was a facet of my mother I didn’t know very well. “What do you mean. Mom?”

“Things are tight back on Earth, Matt. They have been for decades. That’s why women haven’t been getting jobs. The best work goes to men first. That’s why there are women like Mrs. Schloffski. They hang on their men and get a lot of their identity out of what their husbands do. Mrs. Schloffski came out here to follow her family, not from any real interest in the Can. She’s never really had anything better to do than housekeeping-type jobs, either on Earth or here in the Can. That’s what makes her so, well, tedious.”

“I’ll say.”

She smiled, her eyes distant. “I understand her fairly well, I think. That’s what society can do to a woman. But some of us are lucky enough to have some work we’re really interested in. I am. And that’s why I’ll stay, if I can.”

Dad murmured softly. “Even if I can’t?”

Her face crinkled. She was close to tears. “I don’t know, Paul. I don’t know.”

I sat there and felt uncomfortable. These were layers in my parents I didn’t know very well. The pressure and tension of these days was peeling them back, so I could see these inner parts for the first time. What my mother said applied to all the women in the Can, I supposed. Including Jenny. She hadn’t said much about it, but Jenny wasn’t the sort of female who would go back to a humdrum existence Earthside. Jenny had guts, just like my Mom. For Mom to even think of staying on while Dad shipped Earthside—well, that was a revelation. Sure, it wouldn’t be forever, but still…

I sat there, mulling things over. Gradually, from the expressions on my parent’s faces, I saw that it might be a good idea to leave them alone for a while. I jumped up and stammered out some reason to take off.

I went for a walk. Mom and Dad were trying to cover over their emotions some, but I could tell they were depressed. They liked life in the Can, despite the inconveniences—everybody did, except Mrs. Schloffski and other boneheads.

I passed by a work gang and looked for somebody I knew well enough to talk to. No luck. They were patching some resealant. I stopped for a moment and watched. Pressure imbalances and faults get a lot of attention. If you ever want to see people really move in the Can, holler “Vac alert!” I’d seen a kid do that once as a gag. He was on report for two years. I watched the women checking their work, and admired a slim calf or two. Everything was getting sort of jumbled up in my head these days—work and politics and sex (or the lack of it). I shook my head. Maybe all teenagers got as confused as I did, but I doubted it like hell.

I walked halfway around the hub and took an elevator inward to the Student Center. There was a big line of guys near the office. I prowled around and found Zak at the end of it.

“What’s up?”

“They’re taking names of men who want to stay behind.”

“That’s for me.” I got in line. “Quite a few ahead of us.”

“Guys have been waiting around all morning. I don’t figure it matters when you sign up, though. They’ll pick us by abilities.”

“Seems reasonable.”

“Okay for you, maybe. I’ll probably wash out the first time the bridge officer reads the list.”

“How come?”

“I ride herd on computers, and that’s all. I can’t pilot a shuttle, like you, and I don’t know any electronics. I’ve spent all my time on math and learning how to tickle answers out of that overgrown abacus.”

“Maybe you’re right. If you’ve got a small staff, you might as well fill it with triple-threat men if you can.”

“My reasoning exactly. I’m going through the motions anyway. Earthside will be bad, but I’ll be better off than some of you guys.”

“Why?”

“Remember that advertising slogan? ‘You never outgrow your need for computers.’ I can always get work somewhere, partake of the leisure of the theory class.”

“Uh. I guess there won’t be much to do for a shuttle pilot, now that space research is getting the axe.”

“Next!” It was Zak’s turn. He gave the standard information and was waved away. A bridge officer looked up at me with a sour expression.

“Matt Bohles,” I said. “Any idea bow many have signed up?”

“Too many. What’s your job?”

“Shuttle pilot. I know some electronics, too—”

“Who doesn’t?”

“—and I put in some time in Monitoring.”

“Your father is in charge of Monitoring, isn’t he?”

“Yes, but—”

The officer made a note. Maybe he figured Dad had just carried me on the rolls for a while. “How are you going to choose the men?” I said.

“We’ll start with the ones who don’t ask questions. Next!”

I wandered around with Zak. There were people everywhere; it felt like a festival day, only people were clumped together in knots, talking. We fooled around for a while and I mentioned my idea about hiding the skeleton crew instead of forcing the Argosy’s crew to leave them behind. Some of the other kids liked it; others said they preferred a fight, even if the Can’s hull got punctured by accident. They seemed to be looking for a showdown and any handy enemy would do.

The talk wasn’t getting anywhere—good grief, the Argosy was seven months away—so I dropped out and ambled down to Mr. Jablons’ lab.

He wanted to talk politics, too. He’d though! of my idea, and found a hole in it big enough to drive a truck through: what if somebody like Mrs. Schloffski blabbed? That stumped me. We couldn’t very well gag her, and the skeleton crew wouldn’t tolerate leaving her behind. It looked like the only answer was a fight.

I swore off talking about politics; it made my head hurt.

“What I came down here for was some advice,” I said, changing the subject. “I went out yesterday and found a crummy old Faraday cup on Satellite Fourteen. Can’t we rig up something better?”

“Ummm.” Mr. Jablons said. “What about that design you and I roughed out last year?”

“Well—” I hesitated. “The ones we built worked okay here in the lab, but they haven’t been tried in space.”

“We gave them two thousand hours of baking, bursts of radiation, the works. They came through.”

“Right. They’ll sure be better than the ancient one I saw.”

“Which satellite?”

“Number Fourteen.”

“Oh. that’s it. Number Seventeen has the same type. I’ve been nagging people to change those Faraday cups for years. Both Fourteen and Seventeen are in near-polar orbits. That makes them harder to reach by shuttle, and thus far nobody’s wanted to take the time just to replace a part that’s working fine as it is.”

“Well, I’ll do it. Those old ones aren’t sensitive enough for the job. Let’s get the ones we designed out of storage.”

It was a couple of hours before I got the new Faraday cups all checked out and packaged for carrying on the shuttle. They are delicate instruments and can’t be thrown around like freight. It felt good to work with my hands and forget ISA, Yuri, the whole stinking mess.

I went up to the bridge to request a flight plan that intercepted Fourteen and Seventeen both; no use in making two trips. I could have requested the plan over intercom, but I wanted to stick a nose into the nerve center of the Can and sniff around.

The bridge is about two-thirds of the way out toward the rim. smack in the spot most thoroughly shielded from radiation by the mass of the rest of the Can. That’s mostly to protect the magnetic memory elements in the computers; it also shortens lines of communication.

I got past one watch officer, but that was it. At the door to the bridge itself I was stopped and my request taken. I could see into the darkened volume beyond, where viewscreens shifted and threw up lines of incoming data faster than an untrained eye could read them. Commander Aarons was talking to some civilians—I couldn’t tell who—and gesturing at a big display of an Earth-Jupiter orbit, probably the Argosy’s.

Then the officer cleared his throat, asked me if I had any more business, and suggested I move along. I shrugged and went to find Jenny.

It wasn’t hard. She was standing in line to sign up for the skeleton crew.

“What’s this?” I said.

“What does it look like?”

“Sheeg!” I said. “Every fish wants to be a whale.”

“Any reason why a girl shouldn’t be on the skeleton crew?”

“No, none really.” Then I thought of something. “Do you imagine the Commander will pick two shuttle pilots, though?”

“Of course not. Oh… I see what you mean. They’ll split us up.”

“If they take a shuttle pilot at all. Which I doubt. The skeleton crew is strictly a holding operation. No extras.”

Her turn came just then. The bridge officer raised an eyebrow but said nothing; the military has never been a booster of equality for women.

When she was through I said, “Ready to do some work?”

“On what?”

I explained about the Faraday cups.

“Sure,” she said. “Anything to get out of this madhouse.”

I told my father over intercom that I would be gone until after midnight, ship’s time, and to tell Mom not to wait supper on me; I would take enough suit rations. Dad hadn’t heard anything new other than scuttlebutt. The latest rumor was that Commander Aarons had lodged a formal protest with ISA, without expecting it to do any good.

Dad mentioned that Monitoring had picked up more showers of rock orbiting into the Jovian poles; they seemed to be a regular occurrence now. The astronomers were busy trying to explain where they came from.

I told Jenny about the rumor on the way to the lock.

“Is that all he can do, lodge a formal protest?” she said. “Fat lot of good that is.”

“All he can do until the Argosy arrives is talk. There will be plenty of time for action then. The Commander has already sacrificed enough for the Lab as it is.”

“What do you mean?”

“Look, all the bridge officers are military men. When Lt. Sharma made that speech he was advocating that the Commander violate his orders—and Aarons accepted it. Even if he gets us Earthside and leaves a skeleton crew, he’ll be cashiered. The bridge officers effectively ended their careers last night.”

“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 realized 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.”