“My father came from the Private Sector,” she said quietly.
He covered her hand with his. “I’m sorry,” he said contritely. “I didn’t mean that. I’ve got PriSec blood in my own veins, a couple of generations back. Everybody does.”
“I know,” she said wryly. “We’re the salt of the Earth. At least that’s what the government keeps telling us.”
She gave him a warm smile. He held on to her hand. He’d forgotten how pretty she was. The two of them had meshed well during their brief experiment together during the early days of mission training. It had been the policy of the Space Resources Agency to balance the sexes ever since the scandal of the second Mars mission, early in the century. It was the only sensible way to deal with the inevitable tensions. Even the Chinese paired their crew members, though for public consumption they made much of “comradeship” and “Socialist chastity.”
Neither he nor Sue was attached at the moment if you didn’t count Dmitri. He leaned across the table, her hand warm in his. Her dark eyes looked expectantly at him. “Sue…” he began.
“Hey, we’re not interrupting anything, are we?”
He turned his head and saw Mike Berry standing there, a broken-nailed clump of fingers around a pink beer, the other hand resting on Maggie MacInnes’s shoulder.
Maggie was a computer tech, a lean, freckly woman with an impertinent nose and carroty hair worn a little too long for space. She wasn’t wearing anybody’s shirt, just issue shorts and an improvised crisscrossed halter that tied behind her neck, baring skinny shoulder blades. Her rangy figure made Sue look a little chunky. Jameson didn’t know Maggie very well, but after he and Li finished their current schedule of EVA exercises they would be working with Maggie and her counterpart, Jen Mei-mei, plotting orbits and landing approaches.
“No,” he said reluctantly. “Have a seat.”
Sue unobtrusively pulled her hand away from Jameson’s. She smiled a greeting and pushed over to make room.
Berry kicked a couple of airpuffs over, and he and Maggie plumped down on them. “I hear you’ve got the security types buzzing, old chum,” he said.
Jameson looked up, surprised. “How’d you hear that?”
“Oh, word gets around.” Berry hunched over, looking conspiratorial. He brushed his hair forward and narrowed his eyes, in an uncanny imitation of the RB interrogator Jameson had just left. “What’s that?” he said. “You say this Commander Jameson wants us to lodge a protest with the Chinese over their spy camera? Impossible!”
Jameson laughed. “Mike, you ought to be on holovision.”
Berry held up a hand. He changed his body language and became Caffrey, frozen-faced and wary. “Why impossible?” Instantly he was the RB man again. “Because then the Chinese would lodge a protest with
Maggie was laughing too, but Sue looked uncomfortable.
“But when did you meet—” Jameson began.
“You weren’t alone, old chum. They’re doing everybody. Doctor Von Hotseat just arrived this morning on the Earth shuttle. Tuttle’s in there with him now. If you want to know, they started with me, while you were still floating around outside. Wanted to know if I believed in the free exchange of scientific information and all that.”
“See,” Sue said to Jameson. “I told you not to take it personally.”
Berry raised a bushy eyebrow. “What’s this?”
“Oh, I was just sounding off about Security,” Jameson said. He took a swallow of beer and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
Maggie spoke up. “I know what you mean. I never thought I’d get approved for this mission at all. They rescreened me twice. I even had to sign a braindip release.”
Jameson wasn’t surprised. Maggie spoke with an unmistakable Yankee twang. People were more tolerant these days, but when Jameson had been growing up there still had been a lingering bitterness over all the ugliness of the New England Secession, and the loss of so many occupation troops during the pacification. Of course, it had been tough on the New Englanders and eastern Canadians too; particularly the use of nukes. It couldn’t have been easy for Maggie, getting this far in the space program. Since reunification, New Englanders and Canadian annexees were theoretically entitled to full citizenship with all its rights, but there was always that coded notation in their passbooks. There were far fewer restrictions on the children and grandchildren of the Russian refugees of the 2010’s.
Sue changed the subject diplomatically. “Look!” she said. “I’ve never seen Jupiter so bright!”
Jameson looked down into the stars. The splendid gem that was Jupiter had just come into view in the glassed, rail-encircled well set into the carpeted floor of the lounge. It drifted slowly past as the great wheel of the space station turned majestically on its axis. Of all the points of light visible, it was the most brilliant.
The four of them watched it in silence until it disappeared almost beneath their feet. A minute later, the window was full of Earth, blue and dazzling against the threadbare fabric of the night. Beneath the swirling clouds he could make out the brownish outlines of the continents, the elephant wrinkles of mountain chains, the patches of lucent green at the poles, where the Arctic wastes had been planted in snow rice. It all seemed familiar and comforting and close.
“What do you suppose we’ll find when we get there?” Maggie said in a voice that was almost a whisper.
Jameson knew what she was feeling. It got to you every once in a while, that moment of strangeness when you caught a glimpse of that distant spark and realized it was a
Maggie was looking directly at him. He saw her shiver.
“On Io,” Berry said, “sulfur and sodium. On Callisto, lots of pebbles. What else?”
“Why not life?” Sue said. “No, wait minute, listen! After all, Callisto’s got an atmosphere of sorts, and it’s far enough from Jupiter so that it doesn’t get the same dose of radiation as the other three Galilean satellites. Dmitri says that, given ammonia frost and evaporate salts, and the existence of molecular hydrogen…”
In a few moments the four of them were having the usual animated argument about life on the Jovian moons—life on Jupiter itself. It was the major after-hours pastime of the entire Jupiter crew, Americans and Chinese alike. Soon it would be settled once and for all.
“…I see a giant lipid, floating in a pool of methane,” Berry was saying, stroking his scraggly beard and peering into his beer as if it were a crystal ball. He had an exaggerated gypsy accent. “A very complex molecule, like chicken fat. No, no, it’s not a lipid after all! It’s a lipoprotein, in a cloud of sulfur! It’s saying ‘Earth-man beware…’ ”
Jameson stopped listening. He was staring into the bowl of stars at his feet. Earth was gone. Jupiter swung into view again among the wheeling stars. It was clear and steady-bright, and it was half a billion miles away.
Maggie said it for him. She caught his eye across the table and said, “It’s a long way down, isn’t it.”
Chapter 3
“Can’t you scientist fellows do something to stop it?” demanded the Undersecretary for the Department of Urban Safety. He was a large, beefy man in a conservative lace suit over a crimson body stocking.
“No,” Ruiz said bluntly.
The conference room was deep underground, buried beneath the National Intelligence Bureau’s reinforced- concrete antheap somewhere north of Washington. They had hustled him here as soon as he arrived on Earth. They had told him it was because the huge parabolic antennae on the roof of NIB headquarters offered a convenient—and
