Jupiter Project (7 page)

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 Now, out in free space, chemical rockets are as outdated as the horse.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.

It was a long flight. Ganymede isn’t any further away from Jupiter than the Can—in fact, the two are in exactly the same orbit. But not at the same
place
in that orbit—the Can tags along after Ganymede, a million kilometers behind.

Sure, it would be easier to study Jupiter from an orbit closer in; near one of the smaller moons, like Io, say. But Jupiter’s radiation belts are too intense there, so we have to watch Jove from a safe distance. Even so, the Can still needs those pancake “lids” of water to screen out the hard radiation that sleets in on us. We got the water from Ganymede’s ice fields. Ganymede is our corner grocery store out here; anything we can’t mine out of its crust has to be boosted all the way from Earth.

Ganymede is so vital to us, I once got the idea that maybe we should move the Can, put it into orbit around Ganymede itself. Make ourselves into a sort of a moon around a moon, so to speak. My father sat me down and drew me some diagrams, and showed me that Ganymede would block out a lot of our transmissions to Earth, not to mention the telemetry from our satellites near Jupiter. And its reflected light would interfere with our telescopes. So the Can trails along behind Ganymede at a position called the Trojan Point, where its orbit is stable. And every flight between the two takes over eleven hours.

So I was dog tired when we got there. The
Sagan
makes few concessions to passengers; I was sore from my space suit and restless from doing nothing.

Most of our party was asleep when the blue and brown disk of Ganymede rolled into view in the forward port. Zak and I sneaked up to get a better look, even though the seat-belt light was on. I passed Yuri dozing in an aisle seat, no doubt reliving his triumph at squash. Well, I thought, he still had to play Ishi. I ignored him.

But he tripped me as I went by.

I stumbled slightly in the weak gravity and heard his hollow chuckle. “Still clumsy, eh Bohles?”

I knotted my fists and started to say something.

“Oh. mama’s boy is taking offense?” Yuri interrupted me. “Tsk tsk.”

“C’mon, Matt,” Zak said, putting a restraining hand on my shoulder. “Don’t bother.”

I didn’t say anything. There was nothing I
could
say that wouldn’t come out sounding like I was whining. After a pause I turned and followed Zak down the aisle, seething. We looked out the forward viewpoint.

Blue ice and frost spread out from both poles of Ganymede. Around the equator was a thick belt of bare brown rock and river valleys. The rivers sliced through the rims of ancient craters. The valleys were choked with a pale ruddy fog; naked peaks jutted about it.

Thin atmosphere sang around the
Sagan
and we went back to our seats. In a moment our nose bit in and we settled into the long glide down.

We were here for two weeks of frolic away from cares, away from family, away from the Jovian Astronautical-Biological Orbital Laboratory. The family part is important: the psychers say it’s good for kids like us to get away from the
loco parentis
every half year. Keeps down the nervous wigglies in the Lab, makes it easier to live all together in one huge tin Can.