Jupiter Project

Chapter 5

We assembled near the axis of the Can, already suited up. All Laboratory vehicles, from the small one-man shuttles Jenny and Ishi used, to the ion cruiser used on the Ganymede run, are kept in the center of the Can.

As I said before, the Can is a big rotating drum. Most of that drum is empty. The middle of the Can, except for the axial cylinder and the connecting spokes, is open to free space. Our cruiser was parked there and we had to go out and board her.

Captain Vandez stood at the air lock, checking over each of us to be sure we had all our suit vents closed, hadn’t put our helmets on backwards, or something equally stupid. It’s in the regs; he has to do it. A technician who never goes outside can forget a lot in the nine months between mandatory “vacations” on Ganymede. Anything overlooked in free space can be fatal.

“Sing out when I call your name.” the Captain shouted. “Williams! Kandisi! Bohles!”

I answered and turned to look at the rest of the party. Zak waved from the other side of the tube, where he was holding onto an inset ladder. We were in very light gravity, almost at the axis. Orange signs reading ANCHOR YOUR LIFELINE—ALWAYS! jumped out at you from the white walls.

“Sagdaeff!”

Yuri answered “Yo!” I twisted around; he was ten meters behind me. I had a funny empty feeling.

In a moment Captain Vandez said. “You have all been on this milk run before, so I will not make a big speech about being careful. Remember, the Sagan is an ordinary cruiser. She’s adequately shielded against high energy particles but we can’t carry the mass to stop big chunks of rock, or even little ones. That means everybody stays in their suits, with helmets in place and ready to seal, always. Anybody violating the rules will have to deal directly with me, and that can be unpleasant. All right, into the lock!”

We filed in. We were exiting through one of the personnel locks and there were handholds everywhere. I felt a thrumming vibration through the soles of my suit as the pumps sucked the air out of the crowded lock. My suit limbered up and my arms and legs became easier to move. I read the meters and colored displays set below the edge of my viewplate, to be sure my suit was feeding air properly, balancing my temperature and perspiration, etc. The air tasted a little oily, but then, it always does. There are some things engineering never does get around to solving.

The vibration stopped, a red light winked over to green above the big door, and the outer hatch came free. Captain Vandez pushed it open himself. He gestured at a silvery thread fastened to the edge of the lock. It snaked away beyond view. The fellow in front of me leaned forward and snagged it. He climbed along it, hand over hand.

I was next. I clamped a sliding fastener to the line and cast off gently from the lock with a kick.

Every time you go out, it hits you hard. I was coasting along toward the “top” of the Can. The “lid” was pulled aside, to let the Sagan out. It looked like I was gliding toward an ocean of stars, down a bright metal tube. The safety line ended by a lock in the side of a spiderlike fusion cruiser, the Sagan. She was moored near the very top of the Can, against that awesome backdrop of stars.

The thing I tike best about open space is the feeling of complete, utter freedom. It’s as if I was a bird, able to fly straight and true.

Part of all this poetry comes from the feeling of weightlessness. Zero-g is pleasant enough inside the Can, but out here there’s a sensation of freewheeling liberty. It’s like having a weight lifted from your shoulders that you hadn’t even known you were carrying. I felt great.

The man ahead of me had reached the cruiser. I watched as the Sagan grew, and I tumbled over just in time to brake my impact. I felt a touch proud of the maneuver; it proved that freefall squash had kept my zero-g reflexes in shape.

I slipped carefully into the Sagan’s lock. The inner hatch was open. I pulled myself through and found myself in a long room with passenger seating arranged completely around the walls. A man in a ship’s officer’s suit gestured to a seat and I sat down. I clipped my thigh fasteners to the seat and waited.

The cylinder was filling rapidly. Our luggage had been brought aboard earlier—they didn’t want people trying to carry cases while they negotiated their way across to the Sagan.

Zak came aboard and clipped in next to me. I noticed he was already eating some of the food rations recessed in his helmet. I hoped I never felt that hungry: the rations are balanced for nutrition and high protein, but they come out of squeeze tubes and I’ve never been able to get over the feeling that I’m eating toothpaste.

After a while everyone was in and the lock closed. I felt a tug of acceleration as the Sagan nosed out of its mooring point and drifted free of the Can. There wasn’t any way to see this, of course: the passenger cabin was just a concession to us poor cattle and doesn’t have any viewing screens.

There wasn’t any cheerful speech by Captain Vandez, either, about our destination and flying time and how soon we could expect to be touching down on Ganymede. This isn’t a commercial airline. Instead, after some nudging back and forth by the attitude jets. I felt a sudden kick in the stomach. At least, that’s what it feels like when you aren’t ready for it. The Sagan was accelerating away from Jupiter at about one g. For the first minute or so it felt decidedly uncomfortable. Then my body remembered where it was born and accepted one g as normal; my muscles relaxed a little and my breathing leveled out.

The odd thing about the Sagan—or any fusion rocket craft—is the silence. I guess I’ve watched too many old-time movies about the adventures of Captain Daring, Space Explorer. In those the rockets always take off with a roar like a lion with a hotfoot. The ship throws flame and sparks everywhere. Captain Daring clenches his teeth as the vibration shakes him, and you would swear that a hydrogen bomb couldn’t make more of a racket.

Maybe it was like that, once. Now, out in free space, chemical rockets are as outdated as the horse. We use them to brake atmospheric probes as they fall into Jupiter, but that’s because they’re a one-time-only item. Those little one-way jobs are the only ones I know that we use chemical rockets for nowadays. The days of Captain Daring and his thundering jets are gone.

Still, they might be an improvement over the dead quiet way the Sagan takes off. There’s something kind of creepy about smoothly gliding away from the Can, with no sendoff at all.

Zak tells me I’m a romantic. Maybe so. Or maybe I just watch more old movies than he does.

After the acceleration leveled off I leaned my helmet against Zak’s. “Want to see the view?”

He nodded. I got up and pushed off toward the front of the passengers’ compartment. Captain Vandez hadn’t started spinup or pressurized the ship yet. I met an officer just coming in the hatch and touched helmets with him.

“Okay if we go forward and watch over a 3D?”

“Well, Ah suppose so. How many a you? Jest two? Go on, then. Grab a handhold, mind, don’t jest float around. Nevah know when somethin’ might up an’ happen.”

I waved to Zak and wriggled through the hatch. The next compartment was half-filled with baggage secured in netting. We were in the inner tube that ran down the axis of the Sagan. Around us on all sides were storage tanks. At the moment the tanks were empty; the Sagan was returning to Ganymede for more water.

Against the walls were several 3D screens. These were the only concessions to the passengers, aside from seats, that the Sagan made. The screens gave front, rear, and several side views. In color.

Zak bumped into me, but I ignored him. I was busy trying to estimate our trajectory. The rear view was the interesting one.

No, “interesting” isn’t the right word. Beautiful is more like it. In the center of the screen, directly behind the Sagan, was Jupiter.

Jupiter. King of the ancient gods. Lord of the Romans. The lion. The giant. The fat man. Jove.

It filled the screen, striped with horizontal bands of yellowish-brown. The bands churn like thick smoke, each band revolving at different velocities. At the equator the swirling clouds go around Jupiter in just under ten hours.

That’s what they are: clouds. We’ve never seen the surface of Jupiter, the solid rock and metallic hydrogen, and we never will. We can’t get there. The pressure at the surface is thousands of times larger than the pressure at sea level on Earth. We could never design a ship to go there. Even if we could, there’s nothing to see by. No light. The clouds I was looking at absorb nearly all the sun’s light, or reflect it back into space.

I strained my eyes, looking at the equator. I could just make out the writhing masses of giant clouds as they boiled over each other, racing around the planet. Below the ammonia clouds I could see were thousands of klicks of methane crystals, hydrogen, ice, sulfur fumes, thunderclaps, and lightning storms as big as the continent of Asia—a cauldron of instant death for any man who went there.

The lion: Jove contains seventy percent of all matter in our solar system, outside the sun. Even this far out, it filled the sky. Down below the equator churned the Red Spot. A swirling, awesome storm, bigger than a dozen Earths. Each of Jupiter’s bands is a deep layer of gas, spinning at its own speed as the planet whirls. Each has its own grainy, gaudy texture. Here and there a fat storm filled a whole band, rolling like a ball bearing between the bands above and below. Yellow-green lightning forked between purpling clouds.

“Ahem!” A woman cleared her throat next to my ear. “I don’t think you boys should have the first look at everything.”

“We got here first,” Zak said reasonably.

“Rushed up here before we had barely gotten under way, you mean,” the woman said, pushing in front of us at the rear viewscreen. She was as old as my mother and not half as good looking.

Zak opened his mouth to say something and I muttered, “Come on, it’s not worth it. We’ve got all day.”

We moved over to the forward viewscreen.

“Are you boys going to block everything?”

“We’re watching—” I said.

“Well, really, I think you should be grateful your parents even let you go on this trip alone. If you can’t keep your manners—”

“Our parents haven’t got anything to do with it.” Zak said. “It’s Laboratory regs, once we’re above sixteen.”

“Humf! We’ll see what the Captain thinks about two young—”

“Oh. forget it,” I said. “Come on, Zak.” I didn’t know the woman. She must have come in on the Rambler’s last flight.

On my way back to my seat I noticed the air pressure building and popped my helmet seal. I cocked my helmet back and sat down, wondering what I was going to do until we touched down on Ganymede.

Zak went in search of something to read; all our study materials were in our luggage. He came back with two chips of Earthside magazines.

I clicked one in my LCD and read at random. One article was about the staggered working hours in the cities and how much it unsnarls the traffic tie-ups. There was a 3D picture of the subway “packers” of New York—men hired to shove people into the already crowded subway cars, so they can carry a few more. That one earned a double take.

The next article I read was a fashion tip for men: Handy Hints to Get the Right Tint. It had a 3D of a man wearing a maroon coat with an ascot, painting his fingernails.

I asked Zak if he thought Commander Aarons edited the copy that came through the laser beam from Earth.

“Why should he?”

“Well, it seems to me Earth comes off pretty badly in these magazines.” I said. “I mean. I’d almost suspect somebody was trying to keep us from getting homesick.”

Zak put aside his poetry magazine. “Just what is it—oh, I see. Painting fingernails is for women, right?”

“Yes.”

“Who says so?”

“Why—well, my father doesn’t do it. Neither does yours.”

“Yes, they are rather conservative, aren’t they? After all. Matt, the Lab is a backwater. An anomaly.”

“How do you mean that?”

“We’ve got something to do, out here. You follow little green blips in Monitoring, I talk to computers—everybody’s got a job. Even that brat back there—” he gestured behind us, where a baby was yowling—“will have something to do in a few years. Cleaning out the scum in the hydroponics tanks. I hope.”

“So? They have work on Earth, too.”

“That’s where you’re wrong.” He pointed a professorial finger at me. “They’ve got jobs, yes. The government sees to that. Plenty of them. But there’s not much work.”

“You lost me again.”

“How would you feel if you had to sit in an office every day, passing pieces of paper from one cubbyhole to another?”

“Bored, I guess. It would be like going to one of their schools all day.”

“Probably so. It makes you feel pretty useless. That’s the point. People like to see their work doing something; they want to see a final product. A chair, maybe, or a bridge, or a 3D.”

“Uh huh.”

“But that’s all done by machines. The men just push buttons and move paper around.”

“And paint their fingernails,” I said scornfully.

“Sure. Because they’re bored. They’re not doing anything they think is significant. Oh sure, the government says paper-passing is productive labor, but there’s so much make-work people know it’s a sham. That doesn’t jibe with their ego, their self-image.”

“Uh-ho, here we go again.”

“Okay, I’ll skip the jargon. The point is, they’re trying to show their individuality and worth through something other than their work. It’s like birds displaying colored feathers.”

“Expressing themselves.”

“Right. Only, out here, we’ve really got something to do. Fads don’t catch on here. We’re a different culture, really. You wouldn’t look down on a Fiji islander just because he wasn’t wearing a Brooks Brothers suit, would you?”

“No, but—”

“Anyway, Commander Aarons doesn’t have time to worry about what you read.” Zak said triumphantly.

I was still trying to straighten out that jump in the subject when Yuri came clumping over.

“Have you thought about what you are going to do in your recreation time?” he said.

“Sure,” Zak said. “Just what we usually do—stay away from the crowd.”

“Crowd?” Yuri said, his thick forehead wrinkling.

“That’s what we’re out here for, lummox,” I said. “To get away from metal walls and people.”

“I usually try to get in shape. You know, run a few klicks and play some volleyball.”

“Fine. Go ahead.” I said.

“What else is there?” he persisted.

“I usually go out in one of the Walkers. The men at the base are always happy to get some help.” Zak said.

“Same for me,” I said.

“What for?” Yuri asked.

“My friend.” Zak said, “you are no doubt aware of the Ganymede atmosphere project? The base there spends most of its time building new fusion plants, to generate power. The power is used to break down the rocks into basic carbon compounds, water, and oxygen. They’re slowly building up an atmosphere that we can breathe. Only, it’s a complicated business. They need to know how the air and the temperature is changing all over Ganymede, not merely around the dispersed fusion plants.”

“So they’ve put out recorders and pocket laboratories, all over Ganymede.” I said. “Every now and then somebody has to go out and collect the data or make a repair.”

“It’s a fairly dull job if you happen to live on Ganymede all the time,” Zak said. “A tour of the ice fields can get monotonous. But to people like us, it’s a chance to get out and see things. So I volunteer, every recreation period.”

“I see,” Yuri said. “You little squirts are always into something, aren’t you? Me, I’m going to stick to my athletics. It might come in handy.” He looked at me significantly.

“See you around,” I said. Yuri took the hint and walked away. I went back to my magazine.