Jupiter Project

Chapter 1

Maybe I should start off with a big, gaudy description. You know—Jupiter’s churning pinks and browns, the swirling white ammonia clouds like giant hurricanes, the spinning red spots. That kind of touristy stuff.

Except I don’t feel like writing that kind of flowery crap. I’m practical, not poetic. When you’re swinging around Jupiter, living meters away from lethal radiation, you stick to facts. You get so vectors and grease seals and hydraulic fittings are more important than pretty views or poetry or maybe even people.

That’s always been my trouble—people. The way I see it is, there are always going to be some types you can’t get along with. That’s something you’ve got to face. Maybe it’s chemistry. Or as the psychers put it, “orthogonal personality constellations.” Bullshit, I’d say. But then, I’m no expert.

I tend to solve my “group dynamics adjustment” problems by going to the low-g gym. Work off the tension. We’re supposed to be psychologically in synch out here, with everybody packed into the Can, but even the psychers admit there’s always some friction somewhere. I find that working up a good sweat does wonders for my sociability index, and takes the edge off my voice. Not that I’m any great athlete; Matt Bohles will never show up in the Olympics. But at seventeen I wasn’t going to turn into a slab or flab, either, even if I did live in a steel box.

So that’s how I came to be playing zero-g squash with Yuri Sagdaeff in the first place. I wouldn’t search him out for any other reason, that’s for sure. I’d never liked him—“orthogonal personality constellation,” y’know—and I was pretty sure the feeling was mutual. But up to then we had avoided each other.

Usually I’m pretty easygoing about games. Win some, lose some—it’s no big deal. But something told me it was important to win this year’s squash tournament. I’d never even come close before, but this time… well, something in my subconscious was saying do it, dummy. So I was really pushing. I came up against Yuri in the semifinals. I guess that’s where all the trouble started.

I was losing.

I couldn’t figure it out. Things kept going wrong. Not that I was going to give up, of course. My father says a Bohles isn’t really a Bohles if he has the word quit in his vocabulary. Dad says it in this kind of cornball way of his, but basically he’s right. That’s the way I’ve been brought up. So I dug in and swore at myself under my breath, and got ready for the next point.

But, as I said, I was losing.

Yuri had just served the ball as hard as he could. I watched it carom off the wall of the tube and slam into the forecourt. The squash court is a cylinder, with its top the forecourt wall and the bottom the backcourt—only there isn’t any real top and bottom, or up and down, because there isn’t any gravity. The object is to bounce a black rubber ball off both ends of the cylinder—forecourt and backcourt—before your opponent can snag the ball with his racket.

I gathered my legs under me, trying to judge how fast that ball was moving and where I could intercept it. I knew it was probably hopeless—that ball was traveling fast—and if I missed it Yuri would have me down, 18 to 12.

I clenched my racket and jumped. The hard thing to remember, even after you’ve been out in space for years, is that in zero gravity just a little push will get you where you’re going in a hurry. Sure, your mind knows it’s true, but your body has to learn it all over again if you’ve been working in a g-field for a while.

So I overshot.

Too anxious, I guess. I jumped from one side of the tube, about halfway up the cylinder. An instant later I was coasting across, watching that squash ball bouncing back at me from the forecourt, one eye on the ball and the other on the tube wall I was approaching.

It wasn’t that the ball was too far away, at all. I could reach it with the racket. But by the time it was within range of the mighty Bohles right arm, I would have to be halfway through my somersault. That tube wall was coming up fast, remember: I had to turn over in midair and get my legs out in front to brake my velocity when I ploughed into it.

I should have been able to swat that ball and then flip with plenty of time to spare. If I’d judged it right. Only I hadn’t.

“Ah!” I cried, and Yuri laughed at the same time.

Automatically I stretched out my arms to the side and rotated them, to spin me head over heels. Partway into the somersault I had an idea—or maybe just a reflex. Anyway, I flailed around awkwardly with my racket, aiming at a spot behind my back where I knew the ball must be passing.

Thunk! The ball hit the plastic rim of my racket. I finished up my flip and cocked my head around just in time to see the ball drift lazily back into the forecourt, taking its own sweet time.

Then my boots hit the wall and I cushioned to a stop against it. Yuri yelled, started to jump and then thought better of it. The ball bounced softly off the red forecourt wall and came off at an angle. A second later it hit the tube wall and became a dead ball by the rules of the game.

“Tsk,” I said mildly. “It looks like you don’t get that point after all.”

“Luck?” Yuri said darkly.

Yuri pushed off the backcourt wall and glided down to the forecourt. He did a partial repel off the red forecourt and snared the ball, all in one deft movement.

He was good, no doubt about it. He does a lot of no-g work repairing rocket boosters, and he practices. But something was bothering me about this game. I was missing shots I shouldn’t have, not getting into position fast enough. And I had a suspicion why.

“Your serve.” he said, tossing the ball to me. Yuri is burly, muscular, and pretty imposing seen up close. He has close-cropped black hair, a square jaw and a squat, flat nose; squint your eyes a bit and he can look like a badly drawn design for a tank.

The tank said to me, “Winded?”

“Hell no! Medical Division has been worrying about you, Yuri, a heart attack, so I thought I’d take it easy an you.” Even as I said it I knew it sounded pretty lame, just a lot of phony bravado. It did some good, though—Yuri started turning slightly purple. But then he blinked, as if he were reminding himself that I was razzing him from a position of weakness, and turned away with a grunt.

“Serve, kid.”

I decided to try my hunch. I drifted to the back of the cylinder and braked to a stop. Yuri crouched against the wall of the tube midway between the two end walls.

I brought my racket around and served the ball in a diagonal away from him. It hit the forecourt wall with a spock and seemed to be traveling pretty fast to me. Yuri pushed off, taking all the time in the world, and swatted the little black ball as it went by him.

Ordinarily, to win the point I’d be turning by this time, wind-milling my arms, getting set up for the shot. But I wasn’t concerned about the point: I wanted to watch Yuri. One of the tough parts of no-g squash is the fact that maneuvering takes all your attention, usually with your back to your opponent. You can’t keep your eye on the ball a lot of the time. So a sort of Gentlemen’s Convention has evolved; it says that you should get out of the way between your opponent and the ball, so that when he does get a glance at it he can see.

I maneuvered my shot, not taking any special pains to get into the right position. I watched Yuri out of the corner of my eye. He glided across the tube, looked back at me and kicked off again. This time he followed a line that passed between me and the ball for several seconds, blocking my view of where the ball was bouncing off the tube wall.

I pretended not to notice. I pushed off to my left, opposite the way Yuri was going. The ball came flying out of the forecourt, struck the tube wall and twisted off to the side. Yuri had put spin on it—spin I would’ve detected if I had seen the ball’s first bounce.

I was moving one way and the ball, suddenly, was doing just the opposite, and closing with me all the while. I writhed around, trying to reach the tube wall and get another push, but I wasn’t close enough. I made a stab with my racket, but the ball sailed past and thonked hollowly against the blue backcourt wall.

“I believe that makes—” Yuri said.

“Nineteen,” I finished.

Okay, what he’d done wasn’t illegal. It was merely outside the Gentleman’s Convention, and without a referee I couldn’t prove it. Now I understood why I’d been missing shots by a few centimeters, having trouble anticipating his moves and losing sight of the ball. Yuri was playing to make that happen.

The next serve was Yuri’s. I proved once more that we Bohles are slow learners: Yuri used his same serve, but placed it about a foot further away than usual, so my hit-it-on-the-somersault trick didn’t work that time. Besides, I wasn’t really concentrating. I was simmering with anger, kicking myself for not noticing Yuri’s tactics before.

It was my serve. I took a deep breath; the air smelled sour, flat. I hit the ball viciously, taking out my anger on it, and it came off the forecourt badly aimed. It made a nice, clean setup for Yuri. He hit a quick one past me and I couldn’t catch the ball on the rebound. Point to him.

Yuri served, we had a respectable rally that left me winded, and he outfoxed me with a little dink shot to take the game 21 to 13. Game, set, match.

I drifted to a stop in the middle of the court. “Remarkable placement, Yuri,” I said mildly. “You must be quite a growing boy, getting bigger every day. It’s getting harder and harder to see around you.”

Yuri gave me his lummox look. “You imply something?”

“Nothing I can prove.”

“Precisely put. Everyone knows I have been practicing to beat you. It would be bad form for you to complain after losing so badly.”

“You don’t think they’d believe me?”

“Some might wonder…” He casually flicked his racket through the air in a forehand shot, watching it carefully. “But I do not think you are so unwise.” He swung again, making a thin whipping sound.

I set my jaw, gripped my own racket…and then felt sort of stupid. He was right. I couldn’t prove anything, and getting into a brawl on the court wouldn’t help.

“Forget it. You have to beat Ishi to win the tournament, and I don’t think he’ll make the mistakes I did.” (I knew he wouldn’t. I was going to warn him.)

“Very good.” Yuri paused. “I think I shall stay and practice for a bit,” he said pointedly.

“Okay, I’m leaving anyway. I’m due on watch in Monitoring.”

So I left, feeling depressed. I opened a curved panel in the court wall and wriggled into the one-man transfer pipe beyond. I coasted along it, using every other handhold, and came to another hatch. I went through it into a slightly larger tube big enough for two-way traffic, but I didn’t meet anybody in the two hundred yards to the “top” of the center axis.

The squash court, you see, is on the axis of my home. The Jovian Astronautical-Biological Orbital Laboratory, JABOL. Quite a mouthful. We don’t call it that, of course—usually it’s just the Can.

That’s pretty much what it looks like—a big tin can, spinning slowly in the utter black night of deep space. The lid of the Can is a pancake of water, held in shape by a flexible plastic sack. It’s a radiation shield, actually. It floats 50 meters above the spinning metal cylinder of the Can. The bottom lid is the same, so you can’t look into the Can from outside easily. If you could, you’d see that it isn’t solid. There’s a big hollow cylinder in the middle, open to space. That’s where we store our ships and shuttlecraft. There’s room enough, because the hollow center is 200 meters across. And smack in the middle is a long pipe, the central axis, connected by spokes to the main body of the Can. I was in that pipe.

The axis doesn’t spin with the rest of the Can; it’s suspended on gimbals. That means it doesn’t have any centrifugal “gravity”—it’s in free fall conditions. Ideal for adapting an Earthside game, like squash, to zero-g.

Don’t get the idea that JABOL set the central axis just so for the benefit of squash players—it’s all rigged for the Far Eye, our observatory. Over a hundred Can staffers wanted to play the game, and we all had to scrounge the tubing for our court and wangle permission to build it by ourselves, on our own time. It’s ours. (Legally, of course, some bureaucrat in the Association for the Advancement of Science back on Earth has supervision—but let him try and use it.)

I reached the end of the central axis. I was still fuming, not thinking about what I was doing, and I almost closed the pressure lock on my thumb. Grimacing, I slipped into one of the personnel transfer tubes. These are the spokes that connect the axis to the Can. I coasted quickly along, ruminating on the game, and feeling the increasing faint tug of centrifugal gravity as I moved outward, radially, toward the rim decks of the Can.

First deck inside the Can is the locker room, complete with ’fresher. I stripped off my shorts and T-shirt, glad there wasn’t anybody around to ask me how the game had gone. Under the ’fresher’s alternating, stinging showers of ionized water I finally perked up.

Yuri had foxed me neatly, cheating just enough to get away with it. So what? Maybe he’d have beaten me anyway. There wasn’t much I could do about it, anyway, right? In future I’d avoid Yuri and that would be the end of it.

Right? Right.

So I thought.

Ten minutes later, all brushed and scrubbed, I stepped out of a drop tube elevator unto A deck, near Monitoring. As soon as the elevator stopped I’d felt a giant’s hand on me, the full press of one g, because A deck is the furthest one out from the Can’s axis.

I turned left and walked uphill. That’s right, uphill. The decks of the Can are cylinders with a common axis, each cylinder fitted inside the next, layered like the skin of an onion. As I strolled along, hands in pockets, five meters below my feet was the outer skin of the Can—and beyond that, the high vacuum of space. I was facing along the rim of the A-deck cylinder, so the floor curved up in front of me, eventually bending out of sight. It always looks like you’re walking uphill. You’re not, of course, because gravity—the centrifugal force, I call it, though a physicist would shake his head and remind me that it’s really “centripetal,” according to connoisseurs of mechanics—is perpendicular to the floor everywhere. It never feels like you’re walking uphill, but it looks that way, both in front and behind you. On the other hand, to right and left the floor stays flat. If the view wasn’t blocked by partitions you could see all the way to the “top” and “bottom” of the Can.

The curving hallway outside Monitoring Division is a swirl of yellows and greens that spiral around the doors and splash out onto the deck. All this gives the impression of depth and variety; halls look longer and it’s easier for the human eye to locate things, from the contrast. The ship’s psychologist says it’s good for us—who wants to look at gray prefab paneling all day?—just like the Ganymede vacations.

In the corridor I saw two women techs pulling some wiring slabs out of a circuitry conduit. Spot-checking a fault, probably. One of them was bent over and, well, let’s say my young man’s fancy was turned to matters other than electronics. She glanced up and saw me looking. And smiled. I could feel my face reddening. Well, they can’t blame you for looking.

I slid aside the door and stepped into the small alcove that led to Monitoring. For some reason my father was standing there, waiting.

“Ah, Matt. Mr. Tsulamba is pulling extra duty today, so you’ll go on an hour late.” He said this in a straight, informal way, but there was a note of strain in his voice.

“Oh, okay,” I said. “I’ll have lunch first.”

“Got a minute?” he said quickly. He waved toward his office. I nodded and followed him into the cramped little room. Somehow Dad always looks bigger in his office, even though he’s only a few centimeters taller than me. The medical people say I’ll probably dwarf him in a few more years, since the low-g environment will make all us kids taller. But Dad’s over two meters now, without an ounce of fat, and he looks like he wrestles bears for a living. He sat down and put his feet up on his desk—no small trick, in that room—and I folded a straight seat out from the wall to perch on.

“I wanted to talk before you go rushing off to Ganymede. You leave in a day or two, isn’t that right?” He frowned, as though thinking to himself.

“Yes, but I’ll only be gone a week.”

“There are a few things you ought to know before then, and I think you’d better hear them without your mother around.” He gave me a wry grin. “Sometimes she takes the edge off what I want to say.”

“Uh huh.”

He tugged at his long sideburns. “I’ve been hearing some pretty high quality scuttlebutt. Talk about cutting corners on Lab operations, minimizing expenses—but serious, this time, dead serious. I think there’s something behind it. Things are brewing back Earthside. I suspect a few insiders guessed early, several months back. That would explain some of the maneuvering going on in the higher echelons of the Lab.” He stared off into space. “In particular, the adroit sidestepping by a certain figure in Bio-Tech…”

“You’re leaving me behind. Dad. What’s happening?”

“Sorry. Let’s see—in, ummm, about six months you’ll turn eighteen. I suppose you have considered what that means?”

“Sure. I’ll be voting age. Only there’s nobody to vote for, out here.”

He smiled wryly and then frowned. “There’s more than that, I’m afraid. Below eighteen, a boy dips into the knowledge and history the human race has accumulated, even though mankind’s history is mostly a series of regrettable errors. After eighteen, you’ve earned the right to make your own mistakes.”

“Fine. I’m ready.”

“Well…” Dad looked uncomfortable. “I have been wondering if you might make your first big mistake if you elect to remain here at the Laboratory.”

“Huh? You don’t mean I should go back?”

“A solid grounding at Caltech will stand you better in the long run than what you can pick up casually here.”

“I don’t want that. For Chrissake—”

“Calm down. Sit.” I noticed that I had gotten to my feet without being aware of it. I sat.

“I am only making a few observations,” Dad said mildly. “What you do is your business—or will be, six months from now. You are officially a minor until age eighteen. That means you are a member of our family and a student. After that, where you live and what you do is strictly between you and the Laboratory administration.”

“Yes.” I said. I value my independence as highly as anybody, but it sounded as though Dad was practically throwing me out.

“But you’ll always be my son.” He smiled. “You know you’re welcome in our home. I’m just telling you, now, that it’s time to start thinking about the future.

“I have thought about it. I’m going to stay here,” I said, setting my shoulders.

“Now, don’t go all stiff-necked on me.” He grimaced and scratched his bald spot. “Have you figured out which job slot you’re going to apply for?”

“Oh, well, probably for watch officer in Monitoring.”

Dad smiled faintly. “I am sure your mother would be happy to know you freely elect to continue working in dear-old-Dad’s section. What do you really want to do?”

“Uh, something outside, probably. Low-g work.”

“Not a bad choice. Just let me give you a little advice. Whatever you want, use the remaining six months to improve your qualifications for the job. I don’t believe staying on at the Laboratory is going to be a simple matter for you kids.”

“Why?”

“The Project can’t support a Laboratory staff that continues to grow. The Earthside administrators agreed to send complete families out here only because they are socially more stable than groups of singles. There were a lot of other arguments—and good ones—against shipping an eight-year-old kid like you off to Jupiter.”

“I pulled my weight!” I said indignantly.

“I agree. But some children have to be sent back when they come of age, or the Can will pop its seams in a few more years. And remember, appropriations for space research have leveled off. Commander Aarons is looking for ways to trim our costs.”

“Somebody will get to stay.”

“Certainly. I am merely pointing out that it might not be you.”

That worried me. Dad always says that worry is just wasted energy. It wasn’t like him to cry wolf.

I glanced at him. He was gazing distantly at a big display screen on the office wall. It showed the placement of all tugs, shuttles and general traffic around the Lab, color-coded in orange and blue according to priority.

“Dad?”

“Yes?”

“I guess you’re trying to tell me it’s not obvious that I’m supervaluable to the Lab.”

“Something like that.”

“There are a lot of smart kids about my age. I guess I’d better shift into high gear,” I said slowly.

Dad sat upright and looked at me steadily. “The competition is not going to be easy, and you’re all trying for the same brass ring,?” he said seriously.

“Great. I’ll give Commander Aarons a demonstration of what I can do,” I said grimly. “But what were those rumors you mentioned?”

“Forget them for now. Maybe I can tell you more later. Right now you’d better grab lunch.”

“Okay,” I said reluctantly.

Dad stood up and handed me a thick pamphlet. “When you have the time, read this.”

I looked at the cover. It showed two guys talking earnestly under a tan palm tree. It was a catalog for Caltech.

And that unnerved me more than anything he’d said.