trajectory. The answer made her gasp; she’d have to show it to Dr. Mackie as soon as she could tear him away from the viewplate.
There was no doubt about it.
The planet from Cygnus was going to go into orbit around Jupiter.
Ruiz fed a newdollar into the slot and fidgeted impatiently until a holofax dropped into the tray. The news machine in the beachfront refreshment pavilion was the only one he’d been able to find in the whole government rest camp, except for the one in the lobby, and he didn’t feel like walking across a quarter mile of hot sand to get there. Workers who were lucky enough to rate a free vacation on the Nevada coast weren’t much interested in news of the outside world.
For Ruiz it was different. He chafed at the long absence from his work. It was exasperating not to know what was going on with the Cygnus Object—except for the sanitized snippets of information released to the general public. It was exasperating—and humiliating—not to be able to get through to his former colleagues on the Moon; there was always some “difficulty.” Oh, they were sugar-coating his enforced sabbatical, with make-work assignments and the lecture obligations that they’d discovered in the small print of his contract, and privileged holidays like this one. Until the government figured out what to do with him.
He was an embarrassment. The government didn’t like to admit mistakes. Ruiz was a leftover mistake.
The mistake had begun when they put him under house arrest almost as soon as he stepped off the Moon shuttle. The end of the world was politically sensitive information, it seemed. They just didn’t trust him not to blab.
Now that it appeared that the world wasn’t going to end after all, they didn’t trust him to cooperate with the cover-up, which was in full swing now. It wouldn’t do at all to let a powderkeg population of a billion know that their government had suppressed doomsday. Ruiz had too crusty a reputation. It was safer to have a poor frightened hack like Horace Mackie in charge of the crucial flow of information at Farside.
Ruiz squinted at the garish yellow ball of the Sun, shedding its fierce light on the herds of naked people facing seaward. It warmed his chill bones, baking out the old pains. He supposed he was lucky to be enjoying the luxury of Govpark instead of shivering in an isolation cell somewhere. Probably he could thank Harris for that; the man had brains enough to realize that Ruiz, despite his origins, couldn’t possibly have gotten where he was in GovCorp unless he had
Ruiz sighed. Why couldn’t they understand that he had no desire at all to stir up problems? All he wanted was to get back to the Moon, where he could be useful.
A pair of young Govgirls strolled by, big and healthy and tanned, wearing only the briefest of fronties, white teeth flashing, repellesprayed hair still shaking out beads of salt water from their swim. They gave him a cursory glance, then walked on.
Ruiz didn’t belong here, with his seamed face and knobby joints, his hollow chest and baggy jockstrap. He stood there in the hot, insistent sun, squinting at the fax sheet, looking for all the world like some undernourished Privie who’d gotten in by mistake.
He was blocking the entrance to an eats booth, but he didn’t notice the annoyed glances he was getting from people who had to squeeze past him. He was studying the sheet in his hands with growing rage.
The holofax showed a scarred rocky globe with a headline in three-dimensional block letters hanging in front of it. The headline read:
New Moon for Jupiter?
He tilted the fax first to one side, then to the other, to see the part of the planetary surface the letters were obscuring. There were no surprises: just scorched rock like the rest of it. He snorted in disgust and read the brief story floating in white type in the illusory space beneath the sphere. There were no surprises there, either. It was substantially what he’d overheard a few minutes earlier when some bather had walked by with portable holovid blaring:
…
Ruiz crumpled the holofax angrily and dropped it on the boardwalk. So that was the pap they were going to feed the public! Updated computations!
It had taken some unimaginable force to tear that planetary mass from its solar orbit and aim it so that it would be captured by Jupiter. The universe was turning out to be a very queer place indeed, and here he was, stuck in this expensive sandbox for spoiled Guvie brats, while a stuffed gabacho like Mackie had all of Farside’s facilities to play with.
Hot tears of frustration in his eyes, Ruiz stared out over the water. Swarms of boisterous pink bathers splashed in the near surf, and farther out bright little sailboats bobbed against the translucent sky. It was hard to believe that this sparkling bay once had been known as Death Valley, before the ’09 earthquake had split the coast open and opened a channel to the sea.
He shook his head; best take advantage of it while he could. There’d been nothing like it for people like him while he was scrabbling for survival in the stinking tents of New Manhattan.
Ruiz hitched up his jockstrap and picked his way awkwardly through the sprawled sunbathers to the water’s edge. After a dip, he felt better. He picked up his gear and started the long trudge across the desert sands toward his assigned hospice. He’d give it one more try. Maybe this time they’d let him talk to Mackie. He pretended elaborately not to notice the arbee in the striped robe and mirrorglasses who followed him back.
Chapter 5
“Sorry I’m late,” Li said. “Struggle Group meeting.” He made a wry face. “We had to elect a new leader, and the self-criticism dragged on longer than usual.”
“
“Didn’t you hear? Chu Lo got rotated Earth. They send up new biologist this morning. Lady name Tu Jue- chen.”
“Who’s the new leader?”
“Tu Jue-chen,” Li said blandly. “Only democratic way.”
Jameson diplomatically said nothing. If Peking Center wanted to replace their political watchdog this close to countdown, it was their business. He was just thankful that it was a biologist and not somebody involved in the operational safety of the spaceship.
The two of them set off down the corridor toward Stores, helmets tucked under their arms. The great ship was eerily silent, sound smothered in foam. A quarter of the crew was on Earth leave, or at Eurostation awaiting transportation. There was ample room in the 600-foot doughnut of the spin section to dilute the rest of the crew— now grown to almost eighty people.
The sandaled feet of an approaching crewman came into view as they advanced along the upward-curving floor, and gradually the rest of him emerged from the ceiling’s eclipse. It was Kiernan, the wiry little hydroponicist, muttering to himself. As he drew abreast, he said, “If you’re headed for Stores, that new bastard’s going to give you a hard time.”
“What’s the matter?” Jameson asked.
Kiernan jerked his head angrily toward the exit. “I wanted to check out a couple of parts bins to use for seedlings. They’re just the right size. Wang and I punch holes in them for drainage. This Klein makes a big deal out
