Jupiter Project

Chapter 4

The tubeway lights were dimming as I walked home. The air pressure was dropping too, I knew, though the change was so slight I couldn’t feel it. The Can is more than metal walls and oxy bottles; it has to ebb and flow like a natural environment, to fill the human need for a rhythm, a cycle. It has some decidedly non-Earthside benefits, too, like the low-g sleeping dormitory, where you can get the equivalent of a full night’s sleep in about four hours. The way I felt, maybe I’d be using the dormitory tonight.

When I slid the door aside, though, my father was sitting in his favorite chair, reading a fax sheet and there was a toasty, cooking smell in the air. Troubles seemed far away.

“What’s on?” I called out.

“Salad, artichokes, veal, custard,” my mother said quietly, coming out of the small kitchen and wiping her hands on her apron. “And please do not shout at home.”

“He was only releasing a little tension,” Dad said. “He had to sit through one of my lectures today.”

“Oh?” Mom said, instantly concerned. “About—?”

“Yes.” Dad said. Evidently they had talked over my future before broaching the subject to me.

“Well, you needn’t be so glum,” Mom said. “The two of you look as though Matt was shipping for Earthside tomorrow.”

“Well, I am shipping for Ganymede in two days,” I said, making a try at changing the subject.

“I know, and we’ll miss you,” Mom said. “I don’t see why we don’t take our recreation trips together, when—”

“Leyetta,” Dad said. “A nearly grown boy doesn’t want his parents tagging along after him wherever he goes. We’re sandwiched into a small enough area as it is.”

“Hmmm,” she said noncommittally, and went back into the kitchen. “Dinner is almost ready.”

I used the time to stow my school work, straighten up my room and wash my hands. One of the troubles with living in the Can is the squeeze on space. My bedroom is about as big as a decent-sized closet on Earth. I have to keep it neat and put everything away in the wall drawers or I’d go crazy. I’m told we were all tested to find whether we were naturally orderly, before we qualified for the Jupiter Project. No slobs allowed. How they decided the eight-year-old Bohles brat was okay I can’t guess, but they did.

“Matt.” my father called, reminding me that I may have learned to be neat but I’m not always on time.

Dinner was good, as usual. Dad presided over the serving of portions and I dug in. I didn’t pay much attention to the small talk about events around the Lab until Mom said:

“I heard an interesting rumor today, Paul. The Argosy leaves in a week or two, doesn’t it?”

“Yes, it must. That’s when the optimum conjunction comes up for the Earth-Jupiter cruise.”

“Well, one of the women who works in Hydroponics with me heard that Earthside asked for a personnel inventory several months ago.” Mom said.

“Surely they have that information already,” Dad said.

“No, they wanted a new assessment of everyone in the Laboratory. And that’s not all. Earthside asked if there were any jobs that weren’t getting done because we don’t have the time.”

“ISA thinks we’re shorthanded?” I said.

“I don’t believe the International Space Administration ‘thinks’ anything,” Dad said. “It is too large, like a dinosaur, to do anything more than stay alive. The higher functions are left for others.”

“Oh, Paul,” Mom said, and looked at him with an amused smile.

“Well, perhaps I overstated my case. ISA takes orders from the Association for the Advancement of Science, and somewhere in that anthill a few people decide what happens and what doesn’t.”

“Mom, do you think ISA will send us some more staff members?”

“I don’t know, I just work here. But that is what the rumor seems to imply.”

“Just a while ago Dad was warning me that ISA might ship a lot of us kids home when we reach eighteen.” I said.

“I will admit that does not seem to agree with the rumors,” Mom said.

“Ah,” Dad said, raising a finger. “There are several ways to interpret that. If ISA does send you back. Matt, they will have to replace you. The work must be done by somebody.”

“I wish you hadn’t thought of that,” I said.

“I’m merely guessing, son. A word of advice: don’t waste your time trying to fit one rumor against another. Everyone in the Lab knows there is some sort of administrative battle going on in ISA and that there may be changes in our work here. An atmosphere like that breeds rumors faster than your mother can grow this veal in her tanks.”

I took another mouthful, thinking.

“If ISA is going to send us more staff. I would like to know about it,” Mom said. “We will need the time to increase the farming cycle.”

“Dad,” I said during a pause in the conversation, “why is all this happening? Why is ISA rocking the boat now, after the Lab has been out here nine years?”

My father made a tent with his fingers and leaned over the red-topped table. “Like most human problems, it is a matter of too many things happening at once. Earth is running out of raw materials. The fossil fuels, like coal and oil and natural gas, are going. Those don’t hurt so much, because we have thermonuclear fusion to provide all the power we want. Fusion reactors drive the Argosy and the Rambler and run that electric light, there.” He pointed at the ceiling lamp.

“But once the oil is gone, what do factories use for lubricants? Where is the lode of iron? There simply isn’t any.”

“We’re mining the asteroids,” I said. “It’s not like we’re living during the Breakdown, in 1990 or—”

“Sure, that’s a help. In fact, without it Earth would have to cut back drastically and go without a lot of things.”

“It’s that serious?” Mom said.

“I am afraid it is. We have been isolated out here. Any outpost of humanity has a tendency to think of news from home as rather unreal, after a while. I have been following the news summaries sent out from Earth and it looks to me as though things are pretty bad. That Canadian war didn’t help.”

Mom frowned and tugged at her red hair. I suppose Dad hadn’t mentioned any of this to her either, before now.

“Look, Dad,” I said. “The asteroid mines are paying the way for the space program. Why should ISA’s budget problems affect us?”

Dad smiled ruefully. “We knew when we signed on with the Jupiter Project that this Lab was the poor relation of the asteroid program—right, Leyetta?” Mom nodded. “Well, it seems to me things have gotten worse. ISA knows very well it can get metals and rare minerals out of the asteroids. But what can they get out of us?”

“Why, why—lots of things!” I sputtered. “We’re finding out about Jupiter, the biggest planet in the system.”

“Give that young man a silver dollar—asteroid silver, of course.”

“Huh? Isn’t scientific research worth paying for?” I said.

“Matt, dear,” Mom said. “I think you are underestimating the importance of boredom in human history.” With that she got up and began clearing the table. I helped her in my usual style, balancing a saucer on a glass on a plate.

“Your mother speaks like the Delphic oracle,” Dad said, “but she is, as ever, correct. All those intelligent citizens back on Earth aren’t paying for knowledge. They want romance, adventure—vicariously, of course.”

“Adventure?” I said, putting the dishes into the electrostatic cleaner. “Out here?”

“Adventure is someone else doing something dangerous far away,” Mom said. “The Jupiter Project qualifies on all counts.”

“Aw, it’s not so dangerous.”

“Oh?” Dad said. He had gotten out a deck of cards and the cribbage board and was setting up for our standard three-handed game. “Here we sit, surrounded by the radiation from Jupiter’s Van Allen belts, in absolute cold, high vacuum, far from the sun, the nearest help seven months away at best, without even a planet beneath our feet.”

“Okay, it’s a little dangerous. But so is crossing a city street.”

“Getting hit by a commuter bus is ordinary, Matt,” Mom said, “but a meteorite is another matter.”

“Precisely. The trouble is that we’ve been pretty careful out here and nothing very exciting ever happens. That lets out the adventure part. The only thing left is romance.”

“Romance.” I said, thinking. “Oh, you mean hunting around for alien life forms.”

“Yes,” Mom said. She was straightening up the kitchen and making out a list of groceries to request for tomorrow. There isn’t much storage space so she has to plan ahead every day. She flicked on our stereo and light, mellow music flowed into the room and covered the faint noises from other apartments. She looked up at me. “Your father is something of a pessimist about Man as a political animal. But I do agree with him that the man in the street back home cares only about the chances of finding life on Jupiter, dear, no matter what else the Laboratory can do for science.”

“The only trouble is—woe is us—the Lab has not been able to find life,” Dad said. “I suspect the taxpayer and ISA both are getting tired of waiting.”

I spent a moment sorting out the leftover food from our plates and putting it into the disposal tube. Thirty seconds later it would begin a new career as recycled fertilizer in Hydroponics.

“What bothers me most about this damned business,” Dad went on, “is that some people in the Lab have known about ISA’s doubts for months now. A couple of department heads kept their ears to the ground. They’ve been trying to use that information to enhance their own careers—”

He stopped abruptly. One of Dad’s cardinal rules is, no talk about Lab infighting. Gossip is what people turn to when they run out of good conversation. I can remember him saying that there’s no harm in having nothing to say—just try not to say it out loud.

And Dad had started to violate one of his own rules. It meant he must be more worried than I thought.

Mom put an arm around me and said, “Come on, you two. That’s enough. Politics inhibits the reasoning processes.”

“Correct. Cribbage!” Dad said with new energy. “Sharpens the mind, lightens the soul. You’re three games down, Matt, as I remember. Leyetta, your deal.”

The next morning I spent with Mr. Jablons—the one who lost the chess game to Yuri—learning electronics in his low-temperature laboratory. A lot of our instruction is on a one-to-one basis, by necessity.

Take me, for example. I like electronics. I spent more than a year, back when I was twelve years old, building electronic detectors for our satellites. Kids are pretty good at small handwork like that, if you can get them to sit still long enough to get the job done. My specialty was a little beauty called a Faraday Cup. It measures the total number of charged particles that strike a satellite. They have to be built just right, or they’re worthless.

But after all, how many kids are interested in Faraday Cups? When I was learning about them Jenny was maneuvering skimmers and Zak was talking to computers. I comprised a class of one.

That’s the way I like it, too. Big classrooms with thirty kids crammed in, listening to an adult yak for an hour—well, you can keep it. That sort of education went out with the twentieth century and nobody misses it. I’ve heard they’re trying something like it again, though, back on Earth, because the taxpayers have started squawking about the costs of teaching programs. It’s just one more thing to make me glad I’m in the Jupiter Project.

When Mr. Jablons was satisfied that I understood the new circuitry he’d explained, he left me alone. I built a simple black-box arrangement, incorporating the new circuit, as an exercise. It filtered radio signals and passed one narrow band of wavelengths. I tried it out by listening in to some of the routine signals coming from our observation satellites near Jupiter, and the darn thing actually worked. I congratulated myself and walked down to the Education Center.

I was supposed to put in some time on a teaching machine, brushing up on differential equations. Instead I hung around outside, reading the bulletin board, until Jenny turned up.

“Say, I thought you were logged for teaching machine time now,” she said.

I made a face. “That’s just what I need, a girl who’ll nag me until I straighten up.”

Jenny tossed her head, sending her brown braids tumbling in the low gravity. “I wasn’t aware that you needed any kind of girl at all.” She gave me a fierce snarl. I made a demon face back at her.

“Attention!” the loudspeaker system said. Heads turned in the corridor.

“I have an announcement,” a deep voice said. It was Commander Aarons’. “The Argosy has been delayed in its departure from Earth orbit. A series of holdups in fueling her and a few unexpected repairs will make it necessary to reschedule her usual cruise. ISA informs me that the Argosy will be delayed at least two weeks. This will result in the Argosy reaching us about two and a half weeks after her scheduled arrival. Section and Division leaders should alter their work programs accordingly.”

The loudspeaker went dead with a click. I looked at Jenny. “What does that mean?” she said.

I shrugged. “Not much. We’ll have a little longer to get our reports ready.”

“Why bother to announce it? There’s a thirteen month wait between ships anyway. What difference does a few weeks make?”

“Come on, dummy. There’s a favorable configuration between Earth and Jupiter that opens every thirteen months. If the Argosy misses it, the trip gets a hell of a lot more expensive.”

“How much more? I mean, if ISA is worried about budget—”

“Come on,” I gestured toward one of the study quads. “We can probably find out from computer retrieval. Argosy was slated for the minimum-energy orbit, so if it’s late…” I started figuring in my head.

Zak came strolling over. “Hear the news?” he said.

We nodded.

“I took the trouble to run a calculation, since I was using a teaching machine at the time. If the Argosy is delayed more than four weeks she won’t make it within budget.”

“Rather close,” another voice said. Yuri had moved in quietly to a position close beside Jenny.

“I wonder if ISA has anything up their sleeves,” Zak mused.

“Impossible to say. Anyway,” I said, glancing at Yuri, “it’s not our job to worry about ISA. Better we should find something new to dazzle the folks back home.”

“Was that crack directed to me?” Yuri said sharply.

Jenny said quickly, “I don’t think Matt—”

“What if it was?” I said casually.

“You ought to get your facts straight before you open your trap, Bohles,” Yuri said.

“What facts?”

“The fact that Atmospheric Studies works harder than anybody else in this Lab. The fact that we’ve run more probes into the upper atmosphere of Jupiter than the original plans called for. The—”

“Spare me the advertisement,” I said.

Yuri took a deep breath and was about to say something when Zak broke in. “Look, Yuri, we all know those things. ISA is starting to wonder why, with all this work, the Lab hasn’t turned up any evidence for life somewhere down in that ammonia atmosphere. I guess it’s natural for the rest of us—the ones who don’t work in Atmospheric Studies—to wonder, too.”

“There isn’t any answer, no matter what people like Bohles think,” Yuri said, jutting out his jaw.

“Okay,” I said, “give us a hard one.”

“I would like to hear about it,” Jenny said, turning on a brilliant smile.

So Yuri launched into a song and dance about the incredible hardships his group worked under, and how his father in BioTech was shouldering a staggering, superhuman work load—well, that was the implication, anyway. He gave us a lot of facts and figures to go with it, and those were interesting stuff, the straight scoop. As I listened it dawned on me that Yuri was going to be stiff competition for a staff position in the Lab. Commander Aarons and the others were going to be weighing him against me…

I focused my attention back on the conversation. Yuri was describing their latest descent, the one that malfunctioned from pressure overload.

“Meaning, it got squeezed to death,” Zak put in.

“—before it could report on its experiments to find life. But the package of instruments did show that deep in the methane and ammonia there is water and it is warm, as warm as this room is now. All the conditions necessary for life are satisfied.”

“Then why haven’t you found any?” Jenny asked innocently.

Yuri pressed his lips together. “We don’t know.”

“Yuri, you help put together the rockets that drop instrument packages into Jupiter. It’s not your fault if they don’t turn up anything.” Jenny said comfortingly.

“Right,” Zak murmured.

“What puzzles me is that your probes go deeper and deeper, until the pressure crushes them, and they still don’t find any living matter. No airborne spores, no bacteria, nothing,” I said.

“We’ll find some. Bohles,” Yuri said, with a sudden flash of anger. “Just give me elbow room. You will see results.” And with that he got up and left the room.

“Well, all this outdoorsy stuff didn’t calm him down any,” Zak said. “So much for the healing effects of bird songs.”

“Yeah,” I murmured, “he was going along fine for a while there, I guess we just reminded him of his problems and he covered up his worries by getting mad at us.”

“Pretty deep analysis, doctor,” Zak said.

“Go on, you two,” Jenny said. She got up and palmed the room lights down, and then left.

“I cast off for Ganymede tomorrow,” I said, “should do me good to get away from Yuri.”

“You can count me in as well,” Zak said.

“You’re going?”

“I don’t much want to, but the psych people say I should,” Zak shrugged.

We watched Jenny walk down the corridor and out of sight. Skirts are even more impractical in low gravity than they are on Earth—harder to keep from creeping up, for one thing—so everybody wears pants. But there’s no way to disguise a woman when she wants to be noticed, and Jenny departing was far more pleasant and interesting a view than the fake countryside of the meeting room.

“I think she’s a little miffed that her peacemaker attempt between you and Yuri fell flat. She’ll be okay by tonight.”

“Sure. See you at 1900 hours? Got to go practice my guitar.”

1900 hours meant a small party at Ishi’s apartment. Ishi’s parents maintain as much of the traditional Japanese life as they can, living 390 million miles from Nippon. They sit cross-legged on the floor, on tatami mats, and have delicately shaded woodblock prints on their walls. In the air hangs a faint background smell of rice and the salt tang of fish. It all blends together into a warm feeling of home.

Zak, Jenny, and I sat in Buddha position and took part in the ancient tea ceremony, exchanging small talk with Ishi and his parents. (My back ached, but I like the mild green tea.) Ishi didn’t seem bothered by the speculation over sending us Earthside. But then, nothing ever seems to disturb Ishi.

I didn’t mention his Lady X to him, even though I sort of wanted to. I didn’t have any specific questions in mind, but still… The best way I can explain it is that Ishi had been there. and I hadn’t. And it really was true, what Zak said about how a kid should spend his summer vacation trying to get laid.

It was a quiet evening. After the party broke up I walked Jenny home. Making our way through the hushed corridors, with only the whirr of the air circulators, I noticed that I did feel kind of uneasy with Jenny. She was more like a buddy to me than a, well, a woman. Females have a clear moment when they change from girls to women, at least in the biological sense. Males don’t have that. I wondered if it explained some of the way I was feeling. Boys had no way to tell they were men. I mean, nobody pinned a badge on you or anything. So maybe in the back of our heads all the guys I knew in the Can were still boys, without that magic touch. Getting Laid was for sure one signpost, though. There just didn’t seem to be any easy way to do it. Society sure as hell didn’t help. And the whole damned business seemed so irrational, too. Why should I keep feeling that odd, diffused affection for Jenny? Maybe Zak’s kibbutzim analogy was right after all.

Anyway, when we stopped outside her door. I leaned over and kissed her. The idea seemed to go over. She put her arms around my neck and the ol’ pulse rate picked up a bit. But then she let go and smiled and stepped back and murmured something nice and that was it. I made a grin I could tell looked awkward and foolish.

I felt confused on the way home. I wasn’t very good at figuring out the swirl of emotions I had inside me. But then I shrugged. Forget it, I told myself. Concentrate on the problem in front of you; that’s always a good rule. Take ’em one at a time. In the morning I was bound for Ganymede, the fourth moon of Jupiter. I forgot about Jenny and Zak and Ishi and Rebecca the passionate, and went on home to get some sleep.