Jupiter Project

Chapter 2

The foldout tables in the rec room were mostly filled, but I saw Jenny Fleming and Zak Palonski at a large table in the corner.

“Can I join the great debate?” I asked Jenny. She smiled and moved over to give me room, straightening the collar on her orange blouse and fiddling with her braids. Yes, braids—pretty unfashionable, back Earthside. Makes her look younger than she is, when everybody knows a mature, mysterious look goes over better Earthside this season. But braids also keep your hair from straying inside a spacesuit helmet.

“My, you do look a little peaked, Matt.” Zak said. “I trust you trounced Yuri?” Zak has unruly black hair and is a touch fat. He was rapidly finishing off a plate of goulash.

“‘The vanquished have no tongues,’ my son,” I said, quoting a line of his own poetry at him.

“Then I must play Yuri for the championship?” I hadn’t noticed Ishi Moto was in the cafeteria line behind me; he had come over to the table just in time to hear the news.

“Right. Watch out for—” Then I stopped. Better to tell him later, in private. “—his dink shot. It’s subtle. Our last game was a breathtakingly narrow twenty-one to thirteen.”

“I shall prepare,” Ishi said in a way that implied a lot. Ishi is always calm and it’s hard to read that politely expectant look he has. You have the feeling he’s sitting back, watching the circus around him with a slightly amused interest, unhurried, enjoying it all. He chuckles at things a lot and there’s a bemused twinkle in his eye when he talks.

“Why didn’t you challenge me?” Jenny said brightly to me. “I’m out of practice.”

“Why?” Zak said. “Working too hard?”

“My shuttle needs some repair.” Jenny said. “I’ve been overhauling it with the help of some people in maintenance.”

“Why should that take all your time?” I said.

“It is a long task,” Ishi said, “and it must be done as quickly as possible. There are only two shuttles assigned to satellite maintenance. That is the minimum number possible under the safety regulations, since there must always be a backup shuttle in case the first fails while on a mission.”

“Yours is still operating, Ishi?” Zak said.

“Yes. I have not been out, though. There have been no malfunctions among the data satellites while Jenny has had the Ballerina in the shop.”

“Ballerina, is it?” I said. “I thought you’d named her Winged Victory.”

“After that meteorite damage last month. I’m surprised you didn’t make it Victory Winged,” Zak said.

Jenny wrinkled her nose at him and turned to me. “I like Ballerina better, and since I was sprucing her up—”

“Fine,” I said. “Be sure to change the entry in the Lab log, or twenty years from now a little man in a black suit will come around and ask you to cough up for a misplaced orbital shuttle.”

“I know enough to do that,” Jenny said flatly. She straightened her braids again.

I remembered the sandwich I had made, and dug in. The bread wasn’t made from wheat, of course, but from a sort of half-breed seaweed that grows better in low-g hydroponics tanks. After nine years I’ve almost convinced myself I like the seaweed better. Almost.

Zak launched himself into a monologue about a poem be was writing, using terms I couldn’t follow. Zak is the local Resident Character, junior grade: he’s short, intense, and talks faster than most people can think. Faster than he can think, sometimes.

“Hey, Zak,” I said through a mouthful of sandwich, “have you thought about sending those poems back to Earth? You know—to build up a following?”

“Ah, sir,” he said, pointing a finger at me. “You reveal your abysmal ignorance of literary economics. Poetry, my friend, is unprofitable. It’s not worth the price of a ’gram to tightbeam it to Earth.”

“Ummm,” Jenny said, “that doesn’t sound like the Zak I know. Why write poetry if there’s no percentage in it?”

Zak looked shocked, and he was almost a good enough actor to be convincing. “Mademoiselle,” he said, “underneath this simple workshirt beats the heart of an artist. You—”

“Your heart is on the left-hand side,” Ishi said mildly.

“Oh. Yes. Jenny, you malign—”

“Spare us your sensitivity,” I said. “Anyway, Ishi, the human heart is in the middle of the chest. It only sounds like it’s beating on the left side.”

Jenny leaned across the table—which wasn’t hard, considering how small everything is in the rec room—and stared Zak in the eye. “Okay. Zak. I’ll accept the assumption that you have non-larcenous impulses, despite evidence to the contrary. But I’ve seen you scribbling away in a notebook, and there has got to be money in it somewhere. ’Fess up.”

“Oh, you mean my diary,” said Zak.

“Diary?” Even Ishi was surprised.

“Sure. I’ve been keeping one ever since I got here, seven years ago.” Zak looked around at us, surprised. “You mean you three don’t have diaries?”

We all shook our heads. “Why bother?” said Jenny.

“Thou art innocent of the profit motive? Well,” Zak said, shaking his head, “I hope you children have someone to lead you around by the hand when you get back to Earth.”

“What profit is there in a diary?” Ishi asked.

“Think about it,” Zak said, running his finger absentmindedly around the inside of his milkshake glass and then licking it. “Here we are six hundred million klicks away from Earth, orbiting the biggest planet in the system. The Lab is the farthest outpost of mankind. Don’t you think people back on Earth will read an account of life out here, written by—”

“A brilliant young poet?” finished Jenny.

Zak smiled. “Well I won’t say that. But you never know what a publisher will put in his advertising…”

I finished my coffee. “Say, Zak,” I said, “have you managed to tear yourself away from your diary to write that script for the skit you’re putting on? Deadline’s coming up.”

“Sure. Almost finished. I’m wondering if there are enough of us to fill all the roles, though.”

“Why not expand the cast?” Jenny said.

“Count me out.” I said. “I’m playing a guitar solo.”

“Spoilsport—say, here’s someone you can conscript now. Yuri.”

I turned, and Yuri Sagdaeff was sitting down next to me.

“What’s all the gab about?” Yuri demanded.

“Are you anything in the next amateur hour?” Jenny asked him.

“Nope. I don’t plan to.”

“I’ve got a part in my play that would fit you admirably, Yuri,” Zak said.

“Like I said, I don’t plan to. I haven’t got the time,” Yuri said, arranging the food he’d brought with him. He looked at me. “I don’t believe you have the time either, Bohles. Not if you’re going to ever play better squash.”

“I‘ll struggle along somehow,” I said.

“You seem suddenly quite interested in squash.” Ishi said. His face was a model of oriental inscrutability.

“I am.” Yuri said, taking a mouthful of peas. “I just didn’t get around to it before now.”

“You were big on chess two months ago, weren’t you, Yuri?” Jenny said.

“Sure.”

“I didn’t know that,” Zak said, “I’m a bit rusty, myself. Care to try a game, Yuri?”

“No. I don’t play chess anymore.”

“What? So soon?” Jenny said.

“You are a man of sudden interests,” Ishi said.

“Come on, Yuri, you needn’t be afraid of losing to me,” Zak said.

“It’s not the losing. I’m just through with chess.”

“Umm.” Jenny said. “Did you finally get out of that trap Mr. Jablons had you in?”

Yuri smiled slightly. “Of course. And I checkmated him in three more moves. That gave me the championship of the Lab.”

“Verrry smart, Yuri,” Zak said. “Quit while the competition is still looking at your heels.”

“You’ve got me wrong,” Yuri said, waving a hand. “I just get bored with the same old thing, is all. Besides, I’ve got too much work to do. I can’t keep up with everything.”

“Your group is sending down more probes?” Ishi said.

Yuri nodded earnestly, glad to get the attention off himself. “We’re trying to get all the new data we can, in time to be sent back on the Argosy.”

That’s what we were all working toward: the arrival of the Argosy, the mammoth ion rocket driven by nuclear power that was our only link with Earth, outside of laser beam. The economics of interplanetary travel are inescapable. It costs a fortune to push a pound of payload from Earth to Jupiter, struggling up out of the gravitational “hole” that the sun makes.

The whole process takes seven months and the Argosy’s sister ship Rambler follows at the next economical conjunction of Earth and Jupiter, thirteen months later. That means we get a visit every thirteen months. It seems pretty seldom to us, but ISA—the International Space Administration—counts its pennies. We aren’t likely to get more.

“Doesn’t that put the Atmospheric Studies group ahead of schedule?” Jenny said.

“A little,” Yuri admitted. “The series we’re planning will just about use up all our liquid oxygen reserves.”

“That’s not very smart,” Zak said.

“Not smart to get no results, either,” Yuri said.

“What if some emergency turns up?” Jenny said. “You won’t have any high-performance chemical fuel left.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “I don’t get it. Why—”

“Yuri’s talking about those boosters he slaps on the ion rockets that drop our probes into the Jovian atmosphere,” Zak said. “You need the boosters when those bathyscaphes start fighting the winds, down there in the clouds.”

Jenny pursed her lips. “I still wonder about the wisdom of gobbling up that liquid oxygen.”

“Who approved the LOX?” Ishi said politely.

“My father backed it and Aarons went along.” Yuri said. “Not that Aarons could’ve stopped it. My father carries a lot of weight these days.”

I was going to ask what he meant by that, but a better idea occurred to me. “Sounds foolhardy to me,” I said with deliberate mildness. “Particularly since those bathyscaphes haven’t turned up a speck of living matter after years of trying.”

Yuri’s face tightened. “Look, junior, the day Atmospheric Studies gets a package far enough into the water clouds, below the ammonia layers, that’s the day this whole game pays off. We’re the business end of the Lab. Anything we need, we get first priority.”

“My my.” I felt my temples throbbing. “I didn’t know I was dining with royalty.”

“Yuri—” Jenny began in a conciliatory tone.

“Never mind, Jenny,” I said, standing up. “I’ve got better quality guff to listen to. Ishi, you going my way?”

Ishi hesitated a moment and then nodded. “I do have to leave.”

“Let’s hoof it,” I said, and we left the rec room.

We took a drop tube from J deck downward toward A. It was hard to talk while we held onto the conveyor belt loops, so I spent the time figuring how I could’ve slipped the needle into Yuri better, really gigged him.

We got off at D deck and took a shortcut I knew—in fact. I’d helped assemble that section out of the Argosy’s leftover fuel storage drums years before. We kids get used for low-g work a lot, because we seem to have better reflexes—and what else could we do out here, anyway, without a gold-plated PhD?

“You seemed tense back there, Matt,” Ishi interrupted my thoughts. “You wanted me to leave with you. Is there something—?”

So I told him about Yuri’s squash tactics. Ishi seemed to already know half of what I said; very little gets by him on any level, however subtle. When I was through Ishi nodded and said mildly that he would deal with Yuri when the time came. I chuckled inwardly, thinking with relish about Yuri’s impending doom. Ishi would do something crafty but completely fair, absolutely above board—and I’d enjoy every delicious moment of it. Then Ishi said, “You seem more disturbed by this than I would expect, Matt. Is there something about Yuri that bothers you?”

An idea flickered across my mind and I suppressed it. “He’s an oaf, that’s all.”

“You reacted as though threatened by him.”

“He—he tries to intimidate me, lord it over me.”

“Yuri is a type, that is all. There are many of them in the world.”

“Not in this world, not in the Can,” I said fiercely. “He’s a type I can do without. I heard through the grapevine that he waited until Mr. Jablons had a heavy work schedule in the low temperature lab. Then Yuri challenged him for the chess championship.”

“Ah. So Mr. Jablons did not have free time to think over the game between sessions? Ummm.”

I was glad I’d gotten Ishi off the subject of me and onto Yuri. And Monitoring was nearby, so I mumbled a farewell and ducked down a side corridor. I thumbed through the Caltech booklet to keep busy; there were a lot of 3Ds showing crashing white surf, rugged gray mountains and orange groves. What they didn’t show was the press of people, the pollution, the gang fights in the streets. They didn’t tell you it was a dog-eat-dog world back there, a zoo with all the animals out of their cages.

I stepped into the small alcove just inside the doorway of Monitoring. There was nobody there, so I dimmed the lights and went through a side door into the Main Station Room—only nobody calls it that, naturally; it’s known locally as the Hole.

An apt name, too, because it’s utterly dark. I stood for a moment and let my eyes adjust, not daring to move. After a while I could see the dim red lamps spaced evenly between the booths. My booth was the fifth down and I moved toward it at a slow shuffle, being careful not to bump into anything.

The Hole isn’t very big—no larger than a decent-sized apartment—but it’s crammed with equipment. I could hear someone murmuring from around a corner in the aisle; that meant the required minimum of one man on duty was satisfied. But the voice was just a drone, relaying some numbers to the bridge, so there wasn’t anything urgent.

I slipped into my booth and my hands fitted automatically into the control slots. I logged in and tried a few practice commands: a view of Europa, Jupiter’s second moon, off the port bow (reddish, ridge-streaked, most of it eaten by shadow); the docking area, from two separate cameras, showing three men maneuvering a storage drum into place; a shot of free space, with an orange rim of Jupiter in one corner. I switched over to radar.

Then I got down to business. I was sitting in my own separate booth, with my view completely filled by a soft green screen. It looked very much like an old-fashioned radar screen, with one important difference: the blips of detected objects show in three dimensions, since it’s a holographic projection. I could see a jumble of stuff in the center—the Can itself and things parked near it. Then, further out. were tiny points of light that constantly shifted and changed, vectoring in an elaborate dance.

Every second the pattern changed. Jupiter is a huge, massive planet, with a swarm of junk orbiting around it. The solar system’s asteroid belt lies between Mars and Jupiter; Jove has captured a kind of asteroid belt of its own. Compare Earth: it has Luna, a few pint-sized rocks, and that’s all. Jupiter has thirty-nine moons, three larger than Luna, and enough garbage orbiting it to make a half dozen more. Most of the junk wasn’t discovered until the first expedition came out this way, and it’s been a nuisance ever since.

I punched a few buttons and, in mathematical language, asked the ballistic computer a few questions. The machine blotted out a small rectangle in my screen and printed its answers:

NO IMMINENT COLLISIONS RECORDED.

UNKNOWN OBJECT NOTED 13:45 HOURS. PRELIMINARY CALCULATION INDICATES NO DANGER.

YOU ARE SECOND WATCH OFFICER.

I relaxed. There wasn’t going to be much to do on this watch. The chunks of rock and ice that revolve around Jupiter are dangerous—they can zip through the Can in a thousandth of a second, depressurize a level and kill somebody before it’s patched. But there weren’t any of respectable size headed for us.

Still, I checked out the unknown that had appeared at 13:45 hours. Its orbit showed that it was following an ellipse that crossed over the northern pole of Jupiter. The interesting thing was that the orbit swept right into the upper reaches of Jupiter’s atmosphere—so close that, after a few passes, it would plunge in and burn up from sheer friction. That was unusual. Most of Jupiter’s “asteroid belt” circles around it in the ecliptic plane, far out from Jupiter’s rings and the big moons. This was a good-sized lump, too; radar showed it to be bigger than the Can itself.

Anyway, it was no danger to us. Possibly it had come in from interstellar space just a few days ago. Or maybe it was just an eccentric bit of matter from the asteroid belt. The computer would store the data, and someday a research student back on Earth would use it in a study of the solar system. That’s one of the reasons we—the Jupiter Project—are out here.

The computer nudged me: INVENTORY DUE.

I’d been dawdling, musing about that stray chunk of rock. I thumbed a button and the screen erased. Another button, and I was looking at a set of concentric red circles. The center circle was shaded yellow; it represented Jupiter. Each ring around Jupiter was a survey satellite. Most of them were in close to the top of Jupiter’s atmosphere, orbiting just above the clouds of ammonia. Ammonia is the same stuff used in household cleaners, only in Jove’s chilly upper atmosphere it’s frozen into little crystals.

I went through the inventory, typing out questions for the computer about each satellite. Some were recharging their batteries from sunlight right now and transmitting engineering data. Others were bleeding off the excess charge they’d accumulated from particles in Jupiter’s radiation belts, so they weren’t working at full power. I had to check all these things and be sure the operation was “normal” for that particular satellite.

Routine work, but necessary. We get a lot of vital information from the satellites, and they’re the only way we have of knowing what goes on close to Jupiter. The Can itself is a million kilometers further out.

This time I cleared my board right away. If a satellite had shown a malfunction, though, I’d have to carefully diagnose the trouble and turn the problem over to Jenny or Ishi. A sick satellite is no joke. Whoever was on duty would have to make a house call on the patient and fix the thing on the fly, in free space.

I thought about that, absentmindedly tapping the console keys. I like working in Monitoring, sure, but it didn’t exactly make my blood sing. With only thirty teenagers in the Can. Commander Aarons has made an Eleventh Commandment that we fill in where needed. So my personal preferences hadn’t mattered when they moved me indoors, off the repair gang, and into Monitoring.

But I wanted to be working, dammit, using my hands. I could maneuver shuttles and skimmers and one-man jetters—but here I sat on my ass, a clerk.

I grimaced and glanced over at the Caltech catalog. Inside, outside, Earthside—where was I going?