Jupiter Project

I hustled. Off in the distance I could see the faint aura of orange from a fusion caterpillar. The rising mist from its roaring fusion exhaust diffused the light for tens of klicks. Blue-green shadows in the eroded hillsides contrasted with the gentle orange glow. Suddenly Ganymede felt strange and more than a little threatening.

I was glad when the Cat came within sight. It was backed up to the way station. I clumped up the ladder and wedged through the narrow lock into the cabin.

“You’re in time for the feast.” Yuri said.

“Hope I can taste it.”

“Why?”

I opened my mouth and pointed. Yuri looked in, turned my head toward the light, looked again. “It is a little red. You should look after it.”

I got out the first-aid kit and found the anesthetic throat spray. It tasted metallic but it did the job; after a moment it didn’t hurt to swallow.

I broke down the humidity control unit in my suit. Sure enough, the microprocessor had a fault. I look a replacement chip slab out of storage and made the change. Everything worked fine.

I was surprised at how much Yuri could do with our rations. We had thin slices of chicken in a thick mushroom sauce, lima beans that still had some snap in them, and fried rice. We topped it off with strawberry cream cake and a mug of hot tea. Pretty damned elegant, considering.

“My compliments,” I said. “That was undoubtedly the best meal within a million miles.” I felt giddy.

“Some compliment,” Yuri said. “That means I’m better than the base cafeteria.”

I got up from the pullout shelf that we used for a table. The room began to revolve. I put out my hand to steady myself.

“Say!” Yuri shouted. He jumped up and grabbed my arm. The room settled down again.

“I—I’m okay. A little dizzy.”

“You’re pale.”

“The light is poor in ultraviolet here. I’m losing my suntan.” I said woozily.

“It must be more than that.”

“You’re right. Think I’ll go to bed early.”

“Take some medicine. I think you have suit throat.”

I grinned weakly. “Maybe it’s something I ate.” I jerked on the pull ring and my foldout bunk came down. Yuri brought the first-aid kit over. I sat on the bunk taking off my clothes and wondered vaguely where second aid would come from if the first aid failed. I shook my head: the thinking factory had shut down for the night. Yuri handed me a pill and I swallowed it. Then a tablet, which I sucked on. Finally I got between the covers and found myself studying some numbers and instructions that were stenciled on the ceiling of the cabin. Before I could figure out what they meant I fell asleep.

The morning was better, much better. Yuri woke me and gave me a bowl of warm broth. He sat in a deck chair and watched me eat it.

“I must call the base soon,” he said.

“Um.”

“I have been thinking about what to say.”

“Um… Oh. You mean about me?”

“Yes.”

“Listen, if Captain Vandez thinks I’m really sick he’ll scrub the rest of the trip. We’ll have to go back.”

“So I thought.”

“Do me a favor, will you? Don’t mention this when you call in. I’m feeling better. I’ll be okay.”

“Well—”

“Please?”

“All right. I don’t want this journey ruined just because you are careless.” He slapped his knees and got up. “I will make the call.”

“Mighty nice of you,” I mumbled. I dozed for a while. I was feeling better, but I was a little weak. I heard Yuri talking to Zak briefly. I ran over the route we would follow that day. The next way station was a respectable distance away and there was only one sensor package to visit. We would have to spend our time making tracks for the next station—which was just as well, with one crew member on the woozy side.

“Yuri,” I said, “check and be sure we got our tanks filled with air and water. It’s a long way to the next —”

“Bohles, you may be sick but that doesn’t mean you can start ordering me around. I will get us there.”

I rolled over and tried to go to sleep. I heard Yuri suit up and go out. A little later there were two faint thunks as the hoses disconnected from the way station. Then Yuri came back in, unsuited and sat down in the driver’s chair.

The Cat lurched forward and then settled down to a steady pace. I decided to stop worrying and let Yuri handle things for a while. I was feeling better every minute, but another forty winks wouldn’t do any harm. I let the gentle swaying of the Walker rock me to sleep.

I woke around noon; I must have been more tired than I thought. Yuri tossed me a self-heating can of corned beef; I opened it and devoured the contents immediately.

I passed the next hour or so reading a novel. Or rather, I tried. I dozed off and woke up in mid-afternoon. There was a lot of sedative in that medicine.

I got up, pulled on my coveralls and walked over to the control board. “Walked” isn’t quite the right word— with my bunk and the table down, the Cat resembled a roomy telephone booth.

I sat down next to Yuri. We were making good time across a flat, black plain. There was an inch or so of topsoil—dust, really—that puffed up around the Cat’s feet as they stepped. The dust comes from the cycle of freezing and thawing of ammonia ice caught in the boulders. The process gradually fractures the Ganymede rock, breaking it down from pebbles to shards to BB shot to dust. In a century or so somebody will grow wheat in the stuff.

Some of the soil is really specks of interplanetary debris that has fallen on Ganymede for the last three billion years. All over the plain were little pits and gouges. The bigger meteors had left ray craters, splashing white across the reddish-black crust. The dark ice is the oldest stuff on Ganymede. A big meteor can crack through it, throwing out bright, fresh ice. The whole history of the solar system is scratched out on Ganymede’s ancient scowling face, but we still don’t know quite how to read all the scribblings. After the fusion bugs have finished, a lot of the intricate, grooved terrain will be gone. A little sad, maybe—the terraced ridges are beautiful in the slanting yellow rays of sunset—but there are others like them, on other moons. The solar system has a whole lot more snowball moons like Ganymede than it has habitable spots for people. Just like every other age in human history, there are some sad choices to make.

Yuri sidestepped a thick-lipped crater, making the servos negotiate the slope without losing speed. He had caught the knack pretty fast. The bigger craters had glassy rims, where the heat of impact had melted away the roughness. Yuri could pick his way through that stuff with ease. I leaned back and admired the view. Io’s shadow was a tiny dot on Jupiter’s eternal dancing bands. The thin little ring made a faint line in the sky, too near Jupiter to really see clearly. You had to look away from it, so your side vision could pick it out. There was a small moon there, I knew, slowly breaking up under tidal stresses and feeding stuff into the ring. It’s too small to see from Ganymede, though. You get the feeling, watching all these dots of light swinging through the sky, that Jupiter’s system is a giant clockwork, each wheel and cog moving according to intricate laws. Our job was to fit into this huge cosmic machine, without getting mashed in the gears.

I yawned, letting all these musings drop away, and glanced at the control board. “You do a full readout this morning?”

Yuri shrugged. “Everything was in order last night.”

“Huh. Here—” I punched in for a systems inventory. Numbers and graphs rolled by on the liquid display. Then something went red.

“Hey. Hey. B and C tanks aren’t filled,” I said tensely.

“What? I put the system into filling mode last night. The meter read all right this morning.”

“Because you’ve got it set on A tank. You have to fill each independently, and check them. For Chrissakes —!”