Jupiter Project

I went up to the bridge to request a flight plan that intercepted Fourteen and Seventeen both; no use in making two trips. I could have requested the plan over intercom, but I wanted to stick a nose into the nerve center of the Can and sniff around.

The bridge is about two-thirds of the way out toward the rim. smack in the spot most thoroughly shielded from radiation by the mass of the rest of the Can. That’s mostly to protect the magnetic memory elements in the computers; it also shortens lines of communication.

I got past one watch officer, but that was it. At the door to the bridge itself I was stopped and my request taken. I could see into the darkened volume beyond, where viewscreens shifted and threw up lines of incoming data faster than an untrained eye could read them. Commander Aarons was talking to some civilians—I couldn’t tell who—and gesturing at a big display of an Earth-Jupiter orbit, probably the Argosy’s.

Then the officer cleared his throat, asked me if I had any more business, and suggested I move along. I shrugged and went to find Jenny.

It wasn’t hard. She was standing in line to sign up for the skeleton crew.

“What’s this?” I said.

“What does it look like?”

“Sheeg!” I said. “Every fish wants to be a whale.”

“Any reason why a girl shouldn’t be on the skeleton crew?”

“No, none really.” Then I thought of something. “Do you imagine the Commander will pick two shuttle pilots, though?”

“Of course not. Oh… I see what you mean. They’ll split us up.”

“If they take a shuttle pilot at all. Which I doubt. The skeleton crew is strictly a holding operation. No extras.”

Her turn came just then. The bridge officer raised an eyebrow but said nothing; the military has never been a booster of equality for women.

When she was through I said, “Ready to do some work?”

“On what?”

I explained about the Faraday cups.

“Sure,” she said. “Anything to get out of this madhouse.”

I told my father over intercom that I would be gone until after midnight, ship’s time, and to tell Mom not to wait supper on me; I would take enough suit rations. Dad hadn’t heard anything new other than scuttlebutt. The latest rumor was that Commander Aarons had lodged a formal protest with ISA, without expecting it to do any good.

Dad mentioned that Monitoring had picked up more showers of rock orbiting into the Jovian poles; they seemed to be a regular occurrence now. The astronomers were busy trying to explain where they came from.

I told Jenny about the rumor on the way to the lock.

“Is that all he can do, lodge a formal protest?” she said. “Fat lot of good that is.”

“All he can do until the Argosy arrives is talk. There will be plenty of time for action then. The Commander has already sacrificed enough for the Lab as it is.”

“What do you mean?”

“Look, all the bridge officers are military men. When Lt. Sharma made that speech he was advocating that the Commander violate his orders—and Aarons accepted it. Even if he gets us Earthside and leaves a skeleton crew, he’ll be cashiered. The bridge officers effectively ended their careers last night.”

“Oh. I didn’t realize that.”

“We’re civilians, we don’t think in those terms. The Commander will never mention it, but it’s a bald fact. After we’re Earthside we’ll see a story in the fine print of a newsfax somewhere, and that will be it.”

Jenny was quiet after that; I don’t think she had realized quite what was going on.

We took the Roadhog again, with me in the pilot’s chair. The orbit was already in Roadhog’s computer with a launch time about fifteen minutes later than we needed; I had asked the bridge for the margin, just in case I couldn’t find Jenny right away.

Jupiter was a brownish, banded crescent, thinner than it was during our last flight. We boosted away from the Can on a long, elliptical orbit. Changing from equatorial to polar orbit costs fuel and time. We had to alter our velocity vector quite a bit to make rendezvous. Flight time was over six hours. I settled down to wait but I kept nervously checking meters and controls. I was jumpy.

“Hey, sei still, Freund,” Jenny said. “Was gibt?”

“What gives? Oh, maybe I’m worried about meteoroids.” I said, knowing I wasn’t.

“I know what you mean.” Jenny said, taking me seriously. “I found out from the bridge that Ishi was caught in one of those funny swarms we’ve been having.”

“What? Why didn’t they warn him?”

“The swarm was well clear of him, on radar. There must’ve been some small stuff that didn’t show. It looked okay.”

“How come they’re letting us go out at all?”

“There’s a lull, they say. No bunches of meteoroids coming in from the asteroid belt—”

“If that’s where they’re from. We don’t know a frapping thing about them, or these storms, or what in hell is going to happen to us, to the Lab, to…”

“Hey, hey, easy,” Jenny said softly, patting my gloved hand. “Just talk them out slowly. Don’t let all your problems stack up on you.”

So we talked. I told her about the mess with Yuri, about how I was angry and scared of him at the same time. I couldn’t put it into words very well. My feelings were all mixed up inside. Compared to me Jenny seemed serene and sure of herself, and after talking to her I began to feel a little better, too. Between check-ins with the bridge, monitoring the storm activity, eating and getting some rest, we talked and mused about what was happening out here. The time passed quickly.

Satellite Seventeen was a glimmering white dot that swelled into a tarnished ball, even more decrepit than Satellite Fourteen. There were grainy patches where the polished metal skin had dulled and turned bluish-gold, for some reason. I snapped a few photographs for Mr. Jablons.

It took pretty long to install the new Faraday cups. The adhesive patch on my chest was crowded with components and I had to be sure I had all the microchips right.

Jenny left the Roadhog to help because it was impossible for me to hold everything in place and make high-vacuum welds at the same time. I couldn’t even use magnetic clamps to hold all the parts in place, either, since the fields might disturb some of the instruments inside the satellite.

The bridge and Monitoring both confirmed proper functioning of the new Faraday cup; I thought I recognized Dad’s voice.

Roadhog’s ion engine boosted us over to intercept Satellite Fourteen, firing at maximum thrust all the way to make up time I had lost fiddling with Seventeen. I spotted it and tried to shave a little time off by doing the approach on manual. My distance perception was a little faulty; I overshot and had to backtrack with maneuvering jets.

Jenny handled a lot of the dog work on the installation this time. My reflexes were fouled up a little from simple muscle fatigue, but we got everything working well inside the bridge’s allotted time. The window for our return orbit opened just as we were battening down. I gunned her hard enough to see a thin violet trail behind us, and we were on our way home.

Somebody once said that spaceflight is hours of boredom punctuated by seconds of terror. Well, there isn’t much terror in shuttle work but there is plenty of boredom. Jenny and I slept most of the way back. The bridge woke me up once to report a steady rise in storm activity on Jupiter. I acknowledged, and thought I spotted more of those funny whirlpools before I fell asleep again. At the time I didn’t much care if there was a three ring circus on Jupiter, complete with clowns; I was tired.

When I tucked Roadhog into her berth I topped off her fuel tanks and started running through a series of maintenance checks to be sure the instruments were still okay.

“Hey, don’t you want to get inside?” Jenny said. She had just woken up and was grumpy.

“Sure.” I said over suit radio. “But I want to be sure Roadhog is ready to go out